


Parousia

by Auntarctica, sub_textual



Series: Such Divine Purpose [2]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: ALL THE CRYING, Blow Jobs, Body Worship, Devil Trigger (Devil May Cry), Devils cry, Dom/sub Undertones, Heavy Angst, Heavy prose, M/M, Multiple Orgasms, POV Multiple, Porn with Feelings, Post DMC5, Resolved Sexual Tension, Rimming, Service Top, Spardacest Week, Switching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-02-15 22:44:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18678838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auntarctica/pseuds/Auntarctica, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sub_textual/pseuds/sub_textual
Summary: Of first times and second chances.The sequel toThe Sacred and the Profane.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dante is written by sub_textual. Vergil is written by Auntarctica.
> 
>  
> 
> par·ou·si·a - _noun_ \- Another term for the Second Coming 
> 
>  
> 
>  _We've become echoes, but echoes are fading away_  
>  _So let's dance like two shadows, burning out a glory day_  
>  \- [Silhouette, Aquilo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4zvL5gn8Eo)

Do you remember what it was like when we were young, brother?

Because I do. I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever forget. Every time I try not to remember, there it is—like a fucking punch to the face. It’s your smile I remember the most, if you can even believe that at all. Not all the times we fought, or the night you fell, though I don’t know if I’d really call that a memory. 

Memory means it’s in the past.

But it’s been twenty-four years, and there’s nothing past about the fall.

*

Memory.

It’s one of the things Dante wishes he could have had the power to control. It creeps up on him like a hell gate, opening up out of nowhere in the middle of the day when he’s just minding his own damn business, and hits him right between the ribs. A thunderstorm on a sunny day. A fucking hurricane slamming in with no warning. 

It’s a vindictive bitch, sometimes, and the worst part is, it’s not like Dante can kill it.

He can’t even defend himself against it.

There’s a certain agony to being this close to everything you’ve ever wanted, and not being able to touch it at all. 

His brother is alive again—so close, Dante can practically taste his scent, but he can’t seem to figure out how to touch him now, or if Vergil even wants to be touched at all. His fingers itch with the loss. His palms burn beneath his gloves.

He doesn’t know how to be around him, anymore. They aren’t the kids they once were, and Dante certainly isn’t the little brother that had let his entire world fall. 

They’d spent their entire time in the underworld killing demons when they weren’t fighting each other without the intent to kill. It seemed like the easiest language for them to return to speaking, this language of blood and metal. It was easy and effortless to fall back into the rhythm of a song they’d been dancing to since the day they were born. Dante looked across the edge of their crossed swords and into a pair of eyes that no longer mirrored his own and wondered if Vergil could hear it too—the echoes of their past, how their hearts once used to beat in unison.

In the quiet moments when they sat silent and still on unhallowed ground, breathing in brimstone and ash, underneath a sky with no sun or moon, Dante would look at his brother. And just like that, there it was—so sharp and crisp and visceral, it was almost like he was there once more, wrapped up in his brother’s arms with Vergil’s breath hot against his throat. _You’re mine,_ he declared, with his arms around him, his cock buried so deep, Dante had known he never would forget the feeling of it. _Now and forever._

It was enough to take his breath away. He couldn’t look at Vergil anymore, not with the memory of his touch burning underneath his skin, all the hollowed parts of him aching. 

Violence was easier. “Wanna go again?” 

Vergil’s eyes slid over him coolly and Dante’s heart surged ten beats. “Why not.” 

“I’m gonna kick your ass this time.”

“We’ll see about that.” 

His brother smiled, and that was all it took for Dante to end up losing that round. He seemed to lose spectacularly, every time Vergil looked at him in a way that made him remember how he once did. Or he would smile—the faintest thing, really. But that was all that it took to shake reality, the past crashing down like the pieces of sky Vergil sliced apart with his Judgement Cut. 

Since their return to the human world, Dante hasn’t been able to figure out how to make it stop. In the van, it had been unbearable—the silent weight of Vergil’s eyes on him, as he fidgeted with a magazine he had used to carefully conceal the overwhelming arousal that just wouldn’t seem to go away, no matter how much he tried to will it. Nothing seemed to work—not even conjuring up a vision of the nastiest old lady he could think of. He could still feel Vergil looking at him with a sensual, menacing curiosity that made all of the hairs on the back of Dante’s neck stand up. 

It made his dick stand up too, and wasn’t that just the thing.

He simply can’t seem to control himself around his brother at all—not his memories, or the part of him that had once belonged so intimately to his twin.

The problem is, Dante doesn’t know if Vergil even wants him anymore. He certainly isn’t the beautiful kid Vergil once loved who looked like he was cut from the same cloth as a young god. The ravages and vicissitudes of life had carved deep into his skin, which is no longer as sleek and smooth, now weathered and eroded by the caustic winds of time. His face doesn’t even resemble the one Vergil sees when he looks in the mirror—they aren’t identical anymore. 

Vergil looks shockingly young and preternaturally beautiful. 

Just looking at him makes Dante’s gut twist. Especially when he remembers the last time he laid eyes on him—moments before he shattered to dust. 

He should have found a way to save him.

He killed him, instead.

It’s something Dante knows he’ll never forgive himself for, even though he now has Vergil back, alive and whole and beautiful as the day he fell. It’s not the same face he remembers, or even the same eyes—but Vergil is Vergil, and Dante will always recognize the part of him that once made him whole.

He doesn’t know if Vergil wants to remember it at all. What it was once like, to have belonged to each other. It’s not like they’ve spoken about it. They haven’t even touched, beyond the moments when their bodies collided in the heat of battle. And though there was pleasure in that, a deep intimacy only they would ever understand, it didn’t progress further. Vergil certainly gave no indication that he wanted anything more. 

He didn’t pin Dante down with a heated look or his touch. Didn’t grab him by the chin and hold him in place and kiss the breath out of his lungs. He didn’t even wrap his arms around him, the moment they were alone with only hell beneath their feet and the human world somewhere far away. Instead, he just sat down on the ground and caught his breath. Looked at Dante, from across the way, like he did the entire time they were in the damn van. 

But that was all he did. Just look. Like he was trying to reacquaint himself with the shape of his little brother’s face—a face that was no longer young and beautiful, a face that had grown old and worn without him, a face that he probably no longer desired, because that time had long passed. 

It was a lifetime ago.

It was before the fall.

It was a time that had died with Vergil—a past that was probably dead and buried for him, but not for Dante. 

After all, _the past is never dead. It’s not even past._

*

Out of some desperate, pathetic yearning for a dream that probably won’t even come to fruition, Dante had stood in a hot shower and scoured months’ worth of filth off his skin. He cleaned himself meticulously, both inside and out, and managed to groom what he could. He stood in front of the mirror, after, and looked at his reflection, trying to search for a glimpse of the young man he once was. 

But all he saw was a man who had been run down by life. All the light that had once been in his eyes had burned out. The blinding fire that had once defined him—gone. There’s only embers now, and the faded, yellowed pages of a time when he was held in his brother’s arms and made into something beautiful.

He felt incredibly foolish. 

He didn’t know what he was thinking.

How could Vergil possibly want him anymore? He fucking _killed_ him. His own brother. How could Vergil even stand to be near him, at all?

He probably can’t.

It’s why Dante tells him, after Vergil emerges from his own shower, “You can have my bed, if you want. I can take the couch.” He can barely even look at his brother, despite having drunk half a bottle of Jack while he listened to the sound of water hitting the shower floor as Vergil took his turn, and imagined his brother’s beautiful, lithe body glistening, wet, and glorious. 

It made him immediately, unbearably aroused.

And all he can do is try to make it go away by drinking whiskey straight from a bottle as he moves around the pool table with a pool cue in his other hand, trying to kill the nervous energy bleeding under his skin by focusing on anything at all that isn’t his brother. 

It’s torture.

But Dante wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, even if all he’ll ever be able to have is just Vergil’s presence in the same room. He can learn to live with that.

It’s far better than the alternative of not having him at all.

*

Of all the things you never understood about me—which are legion, I assure you—one stands afield and apart, brother mine; one small desire that you never could apprehend.

The desire to keep myself apart, along with the things that are mine alone. You never understood why you couldn’t share everything I’d won, or that I enshrined, even when I was the one who had earned my victories and glories through meticulous and loving study.

But we’re twins, you would say. 

We’re the same. What’s yours is mine. Give me that. What you have. Give me that. I want it.

_Do I want to fuck you, or do I want to be you?_

Well, we eventually answered that question, didn’t we?

*

Of all the things that flooded his mind and gaze in the rushing moment of his resurrection, nothing approached the rapture he felt in seeing his brother again, through his own, whole eyes once more. 

He turned, and there was Dante, leaning into the moment like a man fighting a hurricane, with disbelief on his face and cryptic tears glinting in his eyes like diamonds. A trick of the light, Vergil thought at first—but no, they were there, and to his surprise, his brother did nothing to disavow or hide them. He heard Dante speak his name, through a throat clenched by emotion. His true name, no other. His eyes fell on the book, next, and he bent to pick it up. Perhaps to remark on it. But there was no chance for that. Old scores rose to be settled, and though he couldn’t be surprised, he couldn’t help being disappointed, either.

Now, many days and nights later, they are here—alone together in Dante’s eccentric little roost. It’s utterly surreal to him; more surreal than anything he’s seen in the demon world.

“Shower’s yours.” His brother had come out, silver hair damp and sleek, wearing a henley and pants once more. Vergil’s eyes sought Dante’s bare feet, briefly.

“Thank you,” he said.

He lingers under the hot spray for a long time, letting it beat down on the last twenty-four years. Perhaps, over time, it will efface them, like water on a stone.

When he returns to the main room, he’s dressed, as well—following his brother’s cue. Dante is rounding the pool table, stick in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other. Vergil’s heart gives a hard, quiet pulse. His brother is still the most compelling, exquisite thing in any world, human or demon. His edges are rougher, but his beauty is only enhanced by it, like verdigris; patina on a priceless object. Vergil stares. 

Dante seems at odds, casting about for a moment. Throwing uncertain glances in his direction. It must be strange to have him here. “You can have my bed, if you want. I can take the couch.” 

Dante doesn’t look at him as he speaks. He understands that. It is fraught, clearly; reconciling their impassioned, long-dead past with the current reality: a brother that had become a willing monster, and yet again tried to overtake the world.

It is generous enough for Dante to have him here, and to offer his own bed, at that. One generous turn deserves another. At the very least, he thinks, they will have this well-measured civility between them.

“I’ll take the couch,” he says. “I’m used to far rougher straits.” Sleep in the demon world is strange; a twilight state, something like death and something like deep meditation—truly one eye open. The idea of human sleep actually makes him a little uneasy. Will he be able to remember how to give himself up to such an unguarded, unconscious state? It seems foolish and dangerous to ever be so vulnerable—and yet here, it must be done, or else one will eventually go mad, or die.

In the demon world, there was no room for vulnerability—especially for Dante.

Vulnerability, the kind that is human, has a particular scent that attracts the deadliest of creatures, drawing them out from the depths of the underworld to reap.

They could not fully allow themselves to fall into such an unguarded state, even as exhaustion pulled at the human part of them, the ever-present threat of darkness looming like a tsunami, held in abeyance by their demon blood. Succumbing to it would mean certain death. 

The concept of sleep was easier there, if only because it was a state of stasis, one that wasn’t a full surrender to the threat of the unconscious. Being half-awake at all times also meant that Dante could always keep one eye on his brother. Someone has to keep an eye on you, he’d said as they strolled into the underworld, but what he really meant was that he would never let Vergil out of his sight again. Closing both eyes, allowing himself to drift away completely, would provide his brother with the opening to walk out of his life. And there was no way in any hell Dante would ever let Vergil walk away again. 

He shoots for the eight ball and misses, then curses lightly under his breath and looks up at his brother. He regrets it immediately, as an old, aching desire pulses hot through his entire body the moment he lays eyes on him. 

Vergil’s skin is as it was at the moment of his resurrection: without a single smudge of dirt or ichor to taint its preternatural perfection. Dante’s gaze roams over his brother before he can help himself, hungrily drinking up the surreal vision of him, this dream made flesh standing before him. He wants nothing more than to feel the shower-warmed smoothness of his brother’s skin beneath his fingers. Wants to slide them into the damp, pale strands of his hair and draw their faces together. Wants to lock himself against his brother’s strong, lithe form, and feel Vergil solid and real and _alive_ against him. Wants to taste his breath again, to know his kiss once more. To rediscover the universe he’d lost in the fall, remapping every holy inch of his brother with his mouth, with his fingers, with every bit of himself, in a ritual as sacred as time is old.

He wants, and he wants, and he _wants_ , and for a minute, he almost considers it—foolishly rushing in blindly, damn the consequences. 

But he isn’t quite as impulsive and young as he once was, and the part of him that was once beautiful died when he lost the other half of him that was his brother. There was no hope of resurrecting that at all. 

And so, he simply stands as still as a Roman statue in the ruins of the past, and swallows down the want. Forces it down, with both hands and a gulp of Jack, and focuses on the reality of the present. 

“Take the bed, Vergil,” he tells his brother, after wiping the remnants of whiskey off his lips with a swipe of the back of his hand. “It’s about damn time you had a good night’s rest. I’m not taking no for an answer.” 

The truth is, surrendering his bed has less to do with the selfless desire to provide his brother with some modicum of comfort, and more to do with the fact that he refuses to ever let Vergil out of his sight again. 

Down here, on the couch, he’ll be able to catch him if Vergil tries to leave again in the middle of the night, or in the early light of morning. There is no walking out on him again—not if he guards the door as carefully as he guarded his brother in the underworld at night.

Vergil studies his brother. It is curious, how different he is here. In the demon world, in those interminable hours, they had settled into a pattern; companionable and affable, if not intimate. Brotherly, perhaps. Though Vergil’s eyes would never cease to pierce the distance between them, as they were now.

“If you insist,” he says, after a moment.

He can hear a clock ticking somewhere, and is reminded, briefly, of their childhood home.

He is wearing Dante’s clothes—a black jersey and pants, saved from sameness by their different shades and stages of fading. The shirt is worn; washed almost down to charcoal, broken in by his brother’s body. While they’re a perfect fit, they feel foreign to his own; oddly unstructured. Not what he’s used to.

Yet it’s pleasing, being wrapped in something of Dante’s, something he’s worn long and hard enough to imbue with his essence. He thinks he will sleep in them tonight.

His gaze falls on the bottle in his brother’s hand. Clearly his presence here is a reality that requires sedation to endure. 

Vergil cannot read Dante the way he used to; like an open book, well-loved and oft-thumbed-through. It troubles him, on a distant level, the death of this intuition. The brutal years have left their mark; given Dante more guile, and left him hard and guarded as Vergil once was. Or perhaps it is Vergil himself who has lost the ability, now that his brother is a handsome stranger who avoids his gaze and personal space like it’s a part of his religion. 

What is apparent is that he no longer bears the blazing torch he once did for Vergil; the lighthouse is dark. The Qliphoth was a bridge too far, even for Dante.

It wounds him gravely, in a place far deeper than any defeat.

“Sleep well,” Vergil says, and turns toward the weathered staircase.

It cuts Dante deeper than any sword ever could—the sight of his brother’s back as he turns and walks away from him. It lances straight through the heart of him, tearing wide open the part of him that could never heal; the part of him that was torn out the night Vergil fell. The part of him that was holy, the part of him that was light. The part of him that remembered what it was once like to be alive.

He hadn’t expected how much this would hurt—standing in place and letting his brother go.

It’s not unlike how he felt twenty-four years ago, standing on the edge of a cliff, as he watched his brother fall. Letting go, when he should have held on with all his might. Letting go, when he should have been willing to give up his life. 

He should have fallen with him, but instead he took a step back, and there hasn’t been a day since that he hasn’t regretted the choice he made that night.

He watches as the distance between them grows, telling himself that this is something he can endure. Telling himself that Vergil probably needs this, the safety of distance.

It was, after all, the only thing he ever seemed to really want. Leave me and go, he said in the moments before the fall, plunging himself into an abyss as deep and as dark as the agony of his loss.

Dante gazed for too long into the abyss, and the abyss gazed back into him until all that was left of him was a shadow of himself.

He stares after his brother, his eyes following his footsteps as they draw closer to the stairs that will take him out of his sight. And the thought of that, of not having Vergil where his eyes can hold, is all it takes to push him right over the edge.

This time, he lets himself fall. 

Fuck it, he thinks, as he puts down the bottle and the pool cue, and with a burst of crackling red lightning, he closes the distance between them in a single bound. He wraps his arms around his brother from behind and draws their bodies flush in an embrace that’s as desperate as it is fraught with everything he doesn’t know how to say. He knows he doesn’t deserve this, that he lost the right to hold Vergil long ago, but the part of him that is weak, the part of him that loves his brother, can’t survive another regret. Can’t bear not being able to hold him, at least for a minute.

His brother’s scent fills his nose, and all Dante can think is, _oh fuck_ as Vergil tenses immediately beneath his trembling fingers. 

Dante tightens his grasping embrace and squeezes his eyes shut, his forehead falling to a rest against his brother’s back. He knows this isn’t what Vergil wants at all. He doesn’t want to be held like this. He doesn’t want Dante so close. It probably makes his skin crawl, his stomach turn. 

Vergil must hate him. 

Dante doesn’t blame him at all.

There’s an earthquake rising up inside of him and it’s breaking him apart, and Dante searches for the right words, searches for something to say, but all that comes out is a tense, strained, “Please.” It’s so quiet that it’s almost not even there at all. “Just let me do this, for a little bit. And then I promise…” He takes a bracing breath. His voice hitches with his next words. “I’ll let you go.” 

Vergil stiffens. Everywhere.

The sudden surge of Dante against his back, his arms locking around him, shaking, encompassing—it hits him like a bolt of some arcane opiate; known, withdrawn from in long-suffering anguish, but never forgotten. 

He feels a cacophonous crash of conflicting emotions, all warring for primacy. Surprise, relief, rapture, and the end of torment. Love. And that one surges, until it obliterates the others, blotting them out like a supernova.

Everything goes rigid, even his cock.

He takes a shuddering breath, one that is deliciously hindered by the clasp of Dante’s arms. His hands manage to reach up, grasping Dante’s wrists. “Don’t let me go,” he casts out, on the underside of a breath.

Dante eyes fly open in shock. He almost thinks he imagined it—but there’s no imagining the way Vergil clutches at his wrists, holding onto him with a crushing intensity that bruises, leaving the shadows of himself in Dante’s skin. 

Vergil wants this. Wants to be held. Wants Dante’s hands on him. Doesn’t want him to let go. 

Dante never thought he would see the day when his brother would want him to hold on. He’d spent the entirety of his life chasing after his brother, never quite being able to catch up. Even when Vergil was no longer there to hold, Dante still chased after his memory. Remembering was how he kept him alive, even if some memories were agonizing. 

Some part of him wonders if he’s dreaming, because the brother he remembers never wanted to be caught and held. He was always slipping out from under Dante’s fingers, leaving behind only ephemeral traces of himself in his wake. Dante would follow his footsteps in the sand, only to be stopped by the endless sea. 

The ground blurs beneath him and Dante’s eyes burn. He squeezes them shut again as his fingers clutch tighter, curling into threadbare cotton as the impossibility of reality hits him harder than any fury, digging into his soft, unarmored parts. It utterly devastates him. Leaves him shattered and raw. He opens his mouth to say Vergil’s name, but what comes out instead is a harsh crack of sound, a broken sob of breath in the night.

Vergil breathes out, rubbing his hand along Dante’s forearm, slowly, firmly, like a man trying to chafe warmth back into the dead. It’s meant to be reassuring, but it cannot help being fervent as well. It’s staggering to feel his brother’s love again, to be caged in his arms.

“I thought I’d finally gone too far,” he says, his voice a soft, sharkskin rasp. “That I’d killed whatever feeling you had left.”

“ _How?_ ” is all Dante manages to get out before his voice breaks with the dam of his eyelids that had been holding back the tears. They carve down his cheeks, bitter and hot, an ocean of grief pouring out of him. He tries to swallow it down. Tries to brute force it back where it came from, but there’s no stopping a storm once it’s begun. His body shakes with it, and he buries his face against his brother’s strong back, reeling from relief and guilt and that old, dark pain that finds itself dredged up as he thinks to himself, _of the two of us, only one of us is guilty of fratricide, and that sure as hell ain’t you, brother._

Vergil snorts softly; he is still incredulous at this windfall, at all of it, everything that’s led them to this moment. “Raising the Qliphoth. Urizen. Nero’s arm.” He pauses. “Turning a city of humans into pillars of ash. Take your pick, really.” But Vergil knows something about Dante—it was never about the humans. In spite of his oft-professed stance against thwarting Vergil’s exploits, he cares little more for mankind than Vergil does. His devotion to them is lazy at best, ambivalent at worst. He has never mentioned the dead, not once, in all their recent time together.

Humans were once a convenient excuse for disguising his own selfish desires; what Dante once could not bring himself to say—that he alone was worthy of Vergil’s undivided attention.

Vergil frees one of Dante’s hands from its ardent clutch, raising it slowly to his lips. He presses a kiss to his brother’s palm, closing his eyes.

It sends a violent shudder through Dante’s frame—Vergil’s lips, warm and soft, brushing against his skin. It’s a spark, a trigger, and all Dante can feel is the blast, the cataclysm inside him that explodes out of the abyss. All these years and his brother’s kiss still feels the same, even if his lips are different from the ones that last graced his skin. 

Vergil isn’t entirely wrong—he _had_ gone too far, and Dante should be angry about it. Should be spitting mad. Shouldn’t have forgiven him so easily when Vergil never even said he was sorry. And the sick thing is, Dante knows that he isn’t. Not really. He’d probably do it all over again, if he found himself in the same situation. Humans would die, and Dante would pick up his sword and fight, and they would clash and bleed and end up in the same exact place where they’re standing now, with Vergil offering up a kiss for his little brother to hold.

Dante should be mad, but all he feels is the explosion, the heat of it slamming through him in a nuclear blast. And beneath it all is the love that could never die, no matter how much he sometimes wished he could kill it. 

The truth is: Vergil could destroy the world, but Dante would still love him. 

“How—” he tries again, and he hates how his voice sounds—ragged with grief, trembling with desire and sorrow, and shot through with a deep-seated guilt that he will probably carry until his very last breath. “How could you really think that you could ever kill how I feel about you? Vergil, there’s nothing you could ever possibly do that would make me stop loving you.” 

“Or I you,” Vergil murmurs, feeling his heart stutter at his brother’s words. He takes Dante’s hand and places it against his face. “And yet, once we left the demon world, you shunned my gaze, and avoided my proximity. I assumed your feelings had changed, after so long.”

“I thought you wouldn’t want this anymore.” 

“But this is all there is in the world to want,” Vergil says, and the words are artless, as if self-evident. Dante’s brutal embrace is grounding, even for one of his straight-spined constitution. He pauses for a moment, almost wistfully. “I know that now.”

Dante’s breath shakes as tears burn down his face and his thumb moves slowly, achingly, over the high cliff of his brother’s face; his face, which Dante never thought he’d be able to hold again. But here he is, holding him in his arms, breathing in his scent, and his brother tells him that this is all there is in the world that he wants. 

Not power, not world domination.

This.

It’s as much a shock as it is a balm, and fills him with equal parts joy and sorrow and regret. 

It had taken falling into the underworld, dying, then resurrecting after splitting himself in two for Vergil to finally realize what Dante had known all along—that there is nothing else in the world more important than his brother. That there is nothing more he could possibly ever want, so long as he has Vergil. 

But he doesn’t know how he can say any of that at all. 

So instead, all he says is, “Sure took you long enough.” 

Vergil chuckles softly. “Good things come to those who wait.”

He is relieved to hear irreverence in Dante’s voice again, even if it’s faint, and a clear deflection; a deliberate minimization of less articulable emotions.

He reaches over his shoulder to grasp the back of Dante’s head, crushing his hand into his brother’s soft, silvery mane.

“Dante,” he intones, “regardless of the things I’ve done, you must believe that my intentions were good, always. And you know what they say about the road to hell.”

“Yeah, well, the road to hell fucking sucks, brother,” Dante somehow manages to say.

He fails to see what good intentions Vergil could have had when he wiped out half of Red Grave City. But that sure as hell isn’t something he can say out loud—not right now, anyway, when he finally has his brother in his arms and Vergil has a hand in his hair. 

It’s soothing. It always was.

He sniffs wetly, and tries again to pull back the tide. It doesn’t work. Not really. But at least he’s gotten more of a handle on it. Enough for him to take a few, shuddering, steadying breaths.

Vergil listens. His brother’s emotions seep through his back, steal through his flesh and light up his blood. Dante is distressed, and he feels it deep in his own marrow. Vergil moves his fingers in a slow, cosseting motion.

“Misguided, yes, and my ambition became warped and distorted, especially after…” He breaks off, not sure how to refer to the dark, cracked hours after the black angel’s death. “After the corruption.”

He closes his eyes and steeps in the reality of Dante’s chest against his back, the warmth and presence he thought to never touch again in this life.

“I sought to become a god,” he whispered. “But only for you. So that I could rule the world you walked in, to ensure you never came to harm, and I never came to grief.”

Dante’s fingers drop down from his brother’s face. They slide back down to his bicep, clutching, holding tight. “You wanted to be a fucking god,” he says bitterly, the words clipped and harsh. His voice cracks on the last syllable with emotion that is as raw as it is terrible, and what little progress he’d managed to make pushing back the relentless flood dissipates like smoke. “You always were.” He pauses, swallowing past the choking tightness in his throat. “To me.” 

The words are so simple, yet so incendiary. Vergil feels a hiss in his blood, just before it blooms, suffusing him with everything he’d denied himself, and been denied, all these years. His brother; his lover. The one he crossed back over the threshold of death for.

He shifts, all at once, and turns in Dante’s arms, bringing them face to face, at close range. He grasps his brother’s beautiful face in both hands, paying tribute to the structures there, eyes roaming his features, pleased and reverent.

“Am I still your god?” he whispers.

Dante trembles. His breath seizes in his lungs. His blood pulses hard in his veins. 

“Yes,” he whispers back. 

It’s been twenty-four years since he’s been this close to his brother. Twenty-four years since Vergil’s taken his face like this in hand. Twenty-four years of mourning, of longing for what he thought he’d never have again, but here they are now, and Dante looks at his brother through a sea of tears. Looks at him and wonders how he even deserves to worship at his altar anymore.

Vergil’s hands caress Dante’s face, slowly, as he gazes into his brother’s pale, brimming eyes. He hates the tears he sees there, but the single word hits him like a cannonball.

Vergil leans in, wordless, and tilts his head. His lips touch Dante’s, and everything inside him goes up in flames. His brother inhales a sharp, desperate breath that sounds almost shocked, his lips trembling against Vergil’s as their breath mixes between their mouths. 

For a moment, Dante doesn’t know how to respond. His body tenses involuntarily, every muscle locking up. It’s as though he’s forgotten the steps to a dance that had once shaped their desire and sharpened it to a point that penetrated the deepest parts of his soul. He’s always remembered the feeling of it, the memory of it, but reaching back through time for so long had left him marooned on a desert island, where he stood alone, watching the distant horizon, waiting for the day his sun would set and he would finally be reunited with his brother.

He would finally be able to love him in the afterlife, the way he wasn’t able to in life.

He never thought he’d ever be able to have this again while he was still alive—Vergil’s fingers on his face; Vergil’s breath in his mouth; Vergil’s lips against his own; Vergil’s scent in his lungs. He’s inundated by everything that is his brother, utterly overwhelmed. 

Dante makes a sound that’s almost strangled—a single, shining note of disbelief.

And that’s when he feels it—Vergil’s tongue brushing against his lips. 

This is really happening. This isn’t just another product of his imagination. Vergil is here, warm and alive—oh god he’s _alive_. 

Just like that, Dante opens his mouth and lets in the flood that is the other half of his soul. He sobs, hands flying up to desperately clutch at Vergil, kissing him with a frantic intensity. It’s as though if he dares to stop, this will somehow all come crashing down, and he’ll wake up again, alone in his bed, with nothing but the traces of Vergil’s memory against his mouth. Nothing but the empty space his brother once filled to wrap his arms around.

It feels indecent to kiss his brother through his tears, but of all the things Vergil knows, he knows Dante the best. Pulling away now would devastate him.

Instead, he leans in; deepens the kiss, raising the intensity to match his brother’s breakdown, threading his fingers past his temples, winding his hands into Dante’s lush, raw-silk mane, mingling their tongues and breath and souls, carried into the sacred caves of each other’s mouths like sparrows on the breeze, cryptic and cyclical and eternal.

This is what Dante needs. This is what they both need.

He feels a part of himself restoring, only now—a part that the resurrection missed. Some still, silent chapel in the midst of his core, long crumbled into ruins, unbreaking and becoming whole. He marvels at this, that he could have accorded himself re-minted, whole without this missing architecture.

Dante clutches him fiercely, as if he knows this—as Vergil knows his brother’s shuddering is an unholy amalgamation of grief and passion.

Vergil re-initiates the kiss yet again, slow and caressing and deep as the crash of lace-edged waves lapping with everlasting devotion on the bright beach of a pristine and foreign shore. Dante’s tears spill on Vergil’s jaw and roll down his throat, and it’s just another caress.

His hands are suddenly everywhere, mapping the contours of Vergil’s body. 

Dante needs to feel his brother beneath his hands. Needs to rediscover the sacred parts of him again. Needs to run his fingers over the holy terrain of Vergil’s body, relearning every rise and dip, tracing every mountain and valley until they’ve become inscribed deep within his consciousness. He’ll be able to navigate the cartography of his brother without sight, know every inch of him even more intimately than he knows himself. Worship him blindly in the night, with his fingers, his lips, his tongue. 

This is a body that he has never known. This is a body that has never made love to him before. 

He doesn’t know this body, but he knows the other half of his soul that it contains. The half of him that he never thought he would regain. 

They are no longer two perfect halves of one whole; but the jagged edges of their broken parts can coalesce to make something new, a transcendent wholeness that can only ever be reached during such sacred moments.

Dante shudders into the kiss, his breath wild and gasping as his tongue slowly slicks against his brother’s, again and again, until he’s moaning wantonly into the kiss, his tears slowly subsiding until they’re just traces of salt on his skin. His fingers drive up underneath the back of Vergil’s shirt, a sound almost like a whimper forming at the back of his throat, as flawless skin spills out beneath his fingers to be newly discovered. 

He’s so desperate to feel more of him, to not break their kiss, that he ends up gripping the hemline of his brother’s shirt and tears it straight up the back. The threadbare cotton rips easily, opening up like a pair of tattered black wings. 

Vergil feels the worn cotton of his brother’s well-loved shirt part like a torn sea, hears the long-suffering fabric surrender to his brother’s passionate violence, feels the sudden shift of relative coolness on bare skin, as Dante’s ravenous hands traverse the planes and muscles of his naked back. His brother’s fingers slide up the length of Vergil’s back, clutching and grasping, nails carving into skin. Something gives way inside him, with it. The rush of his brother’s touch is exhilarating, breath-stealing, but Vergil keeps himself in hand.

He breaks their kiss just enough to speak. Dante stares longingly at his mouth, clearly already wanting to return, chest leaning at his braced palm—like a light-eyed, shaggy-maned, silvery wolf straining at a leash.

“I’ve half a mind to lay you down right here,” Vergil breathes, in the scant space between their lips. “It’s been so long.”

“So what’s stopping ya?” Dante murmurs, leaning back in, finding the infinitesimal distance between them already unbearable. He reclaims his brother’s mouth as his hands slide up and plunge into Vergil’s hair, twisting the pale strands between his fingers.

“Decorum, I suppose,” intones Vergil, between his brother’s onslaughts. He groans, feeling the tingle of Dante’s fingers in his hair, unaccountably erotic. “It seems crude. Inadequate for...our first time.” 

Dante abruptly freezes, everything inside of him grinding to a halt as the past brutally crashes down.

His brows furrow and he closes his eyes as all the breath shudders out of his lungs. He hadn’t quite expected how much it would hurt to hear it out loud. Knowing it is one thing, but hearing it makes it real. Hearing it drags back the reality of the past twenty-four years. 

“Our first time,” he echoes, his voice strained with the effort of trying to keep it light. His lips twist up sardonically as his fingers slide down to curl around the nape of Vergil’s neck, and he opens his eyes, letting them focus on Vergil’s mouth, since that’s far easier to handle than his brother’s eyes. “What, you want to lay me down on a bed of roses, or something?”

“Would that be so objectionable?” A faint shadow of a smile stains Vergil’s lips.

“Hey, as long as it ain’t a bed of nails, I’ve got no objections, brother.” Dante pauses. “Though, I guess that could be kinda hot, too.”

“Hush,” Vergil says, softly but firmly. He sees through his brother’s cavalier turn, sees it for the defensive deflection it is. He should not have invoked the past; but he has, and the only antidote to Dante’s anguish is brutal romanticism. And the truth.

He seals the words with a press of his index finger, and a lingering kiss.

“You need to understand something, brother mine. Every dream that wasn’t a nightmare in that place, was of you. And I woke shaking, hard and wanting. I told myself that if I ever was fortunate enough to hold you again in this life, that I would make love to you like I never had before. And I intend to.”

The revelation is devastating, a blow straight to the solar plexus.

It instantly breaks through the carelessly crafted, thin veneer of irreverence that Dante had futilely attempted to draw up around him like armor. 

They hadn’t spoken about it at all—what happened after the fall. It had hung between them silently like smoke, a specter of the past waiting to emerge. 

Dante had always known that his brother must have suffered; that he would have resisted the corruption until it finally broke him. He couldn’t imagine what it must have taken for Vergil to finally succumb. How much he must have endured, while fighting desperately to hold onto the pieces of himself, as they were ripped out of him.

All because Dante had let him fall. 

The thought is unbearable.

“I never should’ve let you fall.” His words are as broken as his expression. Dante presses their foreheads together, his fingers stroking forward to cup his brother’s face as grief erupts through him more violently than any devil trigger. It’s a brutal thing, utterly unforgiving.

Vergil never did hold him again in his previous life. Dante had seen to that.

“I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve—” His breath hitches hard in his throat. His eyes burn behind his closed eyelids. He trembles on the edge of the abyss. “I should’ve saved you.” 

“I wouldn’t have let you,” Vergil says. “I didn’t want to be saved. Not then. I only wanted to spare you.”

Dante’s battered jersey still hangs from his shoulders and arms, a threadbare barrier—one more degree of separation between his brother and himself. Vergil breathes out, and reaches first for one of his shoulders, then the other, easing it off. “And now you have saved me. From my fate. From myself. We’re even.”

He lets the torn fabric fall without watching, and now he is shirtless before his brother.

“Look at me, Dante. All that I am. And know it’s yours alone.”

Dante looks at his brother, his heart aching as his fingers slowly trace the contours of Vergil’s beautiful face. A lifetime ago, such a declaration of love would have filled him with the greatest joy. A lifetime ago, before he let his brother fall alone. 

And Vergil might claim that he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be saved, but even if that were the case, Dante should’ve fallen with him. 

“Not a day has gone by since I lost you that I haven’t regretted not falling with you,” he whispers, the secret falling into the night, as soft as velvet. “I don’t know how you can forgive me, brother. I sure as fuck don’t deserve it.”

Vergil shakes his head, a minimal gesture, so as not to disturb his brother’s fingers. “Because I never blamed you.”

Not truly. Not for the fall. Not for his corruption. Not for his years in exile. He had believed so, once, and for a long time, but splitting himself had disabused him of that notion. Somewhere in the course of wearing half his soul as a disguise, he’d realized that the only thing he’d ever resented Dante for was beating him. “My consequences were mine alone. I own them.”

He takes one of Dante’s hands, and slowly guides it to his chest, holding his gaze as he watches a single tear streak down the side of his little brother’s face. 

“And as for falling, you did. Given a second chance, you dove first. Head first. No hesitation. What more could I ask of my brother?”

“I killed you,” Dante finally confesses in an anguished whisper. Bitterness teems in his eyes; horror burns in his chest. “Fuck, Vergil.” He takes a shattered, ragged breath that dissolves into a choked sob. “I fucking _killed you_.” 

Vergil stares at him for a long moment, then parts with a faint smile. “That’s hard to deny,” he says, easing Dante’s hand over his pectoral. “But how could you ever know? How could you ever guess or apprehend that it was your brother in that demon shell? You killed Nelo Angelo, not me.”

“I should’ve known. I should’ve been able to sense it,” Dante insists, dropping the fingers from his brother’s face to furiously rub at his eyes, as though such a gesture would be able to hold back the flood. “But by the time I saw your face…” It was already far too late. He looked into the eyes of his brother and didn’t see his soul looking back at him. What part of Vergil still remained was muscle and blood, but no breath; a living husk that wasn’t truly alive.

There probably was no saving him. But Dante should have tried. 

“I should have come for you. I should’ve done a lot of things differently,” he concludes as he looks back at his brother with eyes glinting harshly with tears. “I’m sorry,” he finally says mournfully as his voice breaks. “You deserved more from me, but I failed you.” 

“You didn’t fail me,” Vergil says quietly. “You freed me.”

He doesn’t remember as much of the encounter as Dante, though it had begun to to emerge from the walls of his mind, in enigmatic fragments, like shrapnel. But he does remember being the Black Angel. He remembers holding his brother’s name and existence in the vault in his mind, safe from Mundus’ awareness; locked down behind a tongue that didn’t stir, in a decade of servitude.

“I wanted to be released, Dante. To die by your hand was a gift. A last kiss.”

“You don’t get it. You never would’ve lost if I was there to begin with.” Dante angrily grinds his tears back into his eyes. “I should’ve been there.” 

“And what about now?” asks Vergil, with a sudden intensity, grabbing the back of his brother’s neck. “Are you here now, Dante? With me? Because I’m standing right here. And I need you.”

There’s something oddly endearing, almost arousing, about his strapping and masculine brother in the grip of anguish, reduced to tears, undone by his own emotions. Vergil lets his fingers caress where they sit, then clutch again, and Dante shudders. 

Vergil’s fingers are grounding, steadying in a way that no words could ever be. They drag him back from the vindictive grip of the past, and into the heat of the present, reaching through twenty-four years to this moment, finding their way back home. Dante’s knees almost go weak with it—a beloved, trained response that his body still remembers, even after all this time. It responded when his mind could not, refocusing and recentering him in the here and now. 

Dante locks eyes with his brother as Vergil says, “I’m alive, Dante. And so are you.”

He can feel the steady, reassuring pulse of Vergil’s heart beneath his hand. Can feel the warmth of his brother’s breath as it fans gently against his face. Can sense dormant power humming just under his brother’s skin. 

Vergil is _alive_ , and he needs him, and all Dante can seem to do is cry like a little bitch. Shit. 

He swallows past the constriction in his throat and takes a steadying breath, nodding. “Yeah, I’m here,” he says softly. “I’m here,” he repeats again, and then laughs wryly. “Man, this really can’t be all that sexy for ya, huh?” He makes a swipe at his eyes with his knuckles to wipe the moisture away, then sighs and closes the space between them, winding his arms around his brother’s waist and dipping his face into the curve of Vergil’s neck, breathing him in. “I’m sorry. I really want this,” he murmurs. “I’ll get my shit together.” 

“It’s actually...a little bit erotic,” Vergil admits in a sooty undertone, arm stealing around Dante’s broad back. “If only because you cry for no one else.”

Vergil says this as if it’s a foregone conclusion, but a moment later it occurs to him to wonder if he’s right. He had assumed so, given his own singular and unwavering focus on his brother, to the exclusion of all other beings under the sun, or the earth’s crust—but perhaps this is a projection of his own state, and not his brother’s. Perhaps Dante, being more aligned with his humanity, gives more freely of its emotions, and less monogamously.

“There’s no need to hold yourself together, Dante.” He turns his face against his brother’s hair, and the ear beneath it. “Not anymore.”

He sways very slightly, slowly, rocking them almost imperceptibly—comforting, sensually lulling. 

“Break as often as you must. We have time.”

Time is a luxury they never had when they were young. It was always slipping out between Dante’s fingers no matter how desperately he tried to hold on. The time he had with his brother was never enough—he always wanted, needed more than what Vergil could give. 

If he had known just how little time he would have had with Vergil in the end, he would’ve held on tighter, would have fought harder. He never would have let him fall.

All they had was just a year. It felt like forever, and in a way, it was. 

Dante had always known: he was put on this earth to love his brother.

Without him, there was no meaning to life; no purpose, when Vergil was his entire world. How do you survive like that, without a reason to call your own? How do you breathe without his air in your lungs? How do you exist, without your other half to make you whole? How do you live, when your god is dead?

This is the truth: there was no living without him, not really.

There was no letting go, either. Not anymore, when the only person who could’ve held his truth no longer walked the earth.

Dante lived in a perpetual state of controlled chaos, keeping the truth of him buried deep. He can’t remember a time since the fall when he didn’t have to keep himself locked in, protected by the sparkle and the pomp of the fiction he performed on the empty stage he called a life. 

Without Vergil, he could only ever surrender in his dreams. Without Vergil, he had to always keep himself together, contained. 

There’s a hurricane raging inside him, but Vergil is the eye of the storm, and in his arms, Dante feels safe and protected, fearless and invincible. He can finally let go and allow the broken, bruised truth of him to breathe once more. He can let himself fall apart in his brother’s arms and trust that Vergil will put the ugly pieces of him together into the shape of something new; something that might even be beautiful. 

Dante lets out a slow, shaky breath, tightening his arms around his brother as his lips brush softly against his skin. “I missed you so much,” he whispers as he raises his face, nuzzling gently at Vergil’s jaw, his lips ghosting over warm skin en route to his brother’s mouth. 

Vergil closes his eyes, lets Dante’s lips chase over his jaw, then his lips, which he parts at once to permit the slip of his brother’s tongue. They are eye to eye, of a height, of a build, and the parity of it pleases him, the utter equanimity of their embrace. It is always right and natural, with Dante. Other things are hard—emotions, the past—but never this.

Never this.

“Dante,” he murmurs, against his brother’s soft and hungry mouth. “Why don’t you take me to bed?” He cups the back of Dante’s neck again. “Our bed,” he whispers.

Dante exhales a soft, quiet breath against his brother’s mouth, as his fingers slide up gently to caress Vergil’s jaw. His lips curve up gently at the corners, his heart pulsing with love as warmth floods through him. “Of course, brother,” he murmurs, and then pulls away to take Vergil’s hand and leads him up the stairs. 

“You know,” he says lightly, as he opens the door, then glances over his shoulder at his brother. “I’ve never brought anyone else home.” 

“Never?” Vergil is surprised, and it shows on his face. “In all that time?”

He remembers catching Dante _in flagrante_ with some human in an alleyway, how listless his passions had been in the man’s embrace, and yet clearly he had been driven to seek affection. Touch-hungry in the moment, and alone too long.

“You only went home with them, is that it?”

Tension winds through Dante’s shoulders until he remembers to relax. 

“Yeah, something like that. But I never brought anyone else here.” 

_It’s still ours_ lingers unspoken between them. 

He never wanted the sanctity of where they once made love to be desecrated by another. 

Dante averts his gaze from Vergil’s face in favor of finding the light switch. His bedroom is as he left it before everything went to shit with Urizen—a complete, utter mess. He hadn’t had any reason to keep it tidy like he once did, when he had a brother who might’ve come home to him. 

Dirty clothes lie strewn over the floor, his bedsheets undone, as though he’d just gotten up that morning and forgotten to make his bed. Empty bottles of liquor lie scattered throughout the room—a shameful reminder of one of the many unhealthy ways Dante once used to cope. He winces slightly as he realizes _just_ how bad his room is. Maybe he shouldn’t have turned on the light after all. 

“Sorry about the mess. I’ll take care of it in the morning.” 

Vergil reaches for his brother, ignoring his apologies, easing his hands up under the well-distressed henley, slowly pushing it up over Dante’s washboard of a stomach, blatantly appreciating what he reveals. 

He understands, and says nothing. The state of the room echoes the state of the man; one who cannot be bothered with—or bear—being kind to himself. It is a negligence born of long-entrenched despair—one he immediately recognized for what it was, when he first turned, reborn, and saw the rugged figure before him. For once, Dante looked like a real gunslinger; a man who had rode hard and lived rough and spent sleepless nights under unfeeling stars.

The room is an unshaven face. An untrimmed mane.

But it does nothing to diminish the absolute art of the underlying man; the classical perfection of his twin. “Such beauty,” Vergil murmurs. “Am I still worthy of it?”

“I’m the one who’s unworthy,” Dante whispers back, a flush slowly burning up the length of his neck to grace his cheeks, ignited by the heat of his brother’s eyes. He’s shocked that Vergil can find anything beautiful about him at all; he can barely even stand to look at himself in the mirror. He’s nothing like the young god who stands before him now, chiseled from divine marble, breathtakingly beautiful. 

Dante helps to divest himself of his shirt, pulling it over his head and dropping it to the floor. His hands find their way back to his brother, curving around his hips as he draws their bodies flush, nose brushing against Vergil’s as he leans in for another kiss. 

“You’re the only one who’s worthy,” Vergil amends, as he meets Dante’s lips and lets his hands run slowly over his brother’s well-worked torso, minding every ridge and ripple of muscle; as he feels himself stir below, rising to the occasion, like he does every time with Dante, no matter what shape their engagement takes.

He slides his hand over the cut, angled plane of a hip, down a hard lower stomach that tenses with anticipation beneath his touch, and slips beneath his brother’s low-slung waistband, fingertips just brushing the tips of enticing netherhair; trimmed, but present.

“I see the topiary is being maintained,” he murmurs, with a barely visible smile. “I daresay you’ve been expecting me.”

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted to,” Dante says softly as his fingers slide up slowly, appreciatively over the exquisite terrain of his brother’s chest. “But I was hopin’ that maybe you would.” His nose brushes against Vergil’s as his fingers drift up, splaying across the space over his heart, feeling its strong beat beneath his palm. “I still remember what you like…”

Vergil leans into the touch. “I was a little more particular as a sullen brat, brother, but I’m flattered all the same.”

It seems precious and self-indulgent now, that he ever maintained such a preference, with twenty-four years of bitter hindsight. He would take Dante in any form, now, and the idea of more lush tertiary hair to catch and hold his brother’s rough musk does not dismay him whatsoever.

It fascinates him, in fact, how masculine and fully-formed Dante has become—no longer just an insolent and beautiful youth, strapping far beyond his human years, but an actual man—with a power and permanence that steals Vergil’s breath; handsome features cynical, settled and wry, body cast in bronze.

Desire curls low in his core as he regards the intimate stranger before him.

“What else do I like?” he murmurs.

There’s a predatory sensuality to those words, which wrap around Dante like fingers around his cock. He’s captivated by it, and by the dark promise in his brother’s eyes, which reaches inside of him and strokes him from within. 

It makes the heat in his blood race as fast as his heart. Makes his breath quicken as his pupils dilate, and his arousal grows full and pronounced. 

Show me what you still remember, Vergil doesn’t quite say, but Dante hears. 

“You like it when I kneel,” he says softly, his heart thundering beneath his ribs. 

Vergil smiles. “Ah, yes,” he says, equally softly. “I believe I do like that.”

He reaches out and cards his brother’s hair back at the temple, gazing into his lupine eyes, which have grown hazy with desire, basking in his pale, smoldering gaze and the indecent intentions there.

“And how do you like it, little brother? Getting on your knees for me?”

“You got it wrong, brother. I don’t like it,” Dante says with a soft curl of his mouth. “I love it.”

“What else do you love?” whispers Vergil.

A quiet tremble of anticipation runs down the length of Dante’s spine, as he meets his brother’s gaze and recognizes a ravenous hunger that can only be sated by one thing. 

He was never quite able to verbalize it when he was young, too embarrassed to speak his desire out loud; too proud for his own damn good to give his brother the satisfaction of the truth he spoke with his body, but not with his mouth. 

It’s different now that they have this precious second chance. He doesn’t want to squander it, and certainly isn’t going to let his pride get in the way again. 

“I love it when you let me suck your cock,” he rasps out in a quiet breath. “When you let me—” _worship you, serve you, love you_ “—make you feel good.”

Vergil smiles again. His fingers caress his brother’s hair in deep, slow strokes.

He supposes it is a lot to ask, that Dante utter the raw, naked words so soon, after so long, no matter how much Vergil longs to hear them. No matter how long he’s lived in exile, in the cold shadow of existence, without them. Too much, too soon. Vergil knows he can be demanding.

“Far be it from me to keep a man from what he loves,” he says, and starts, one-handed, to unfasten his pants. It attracts Dante’s eyes, pulling his gaze south, his lips parting as he inhales a quiet, eager breath when he registers the prominent bulge at the front of his brother’s pants. 

He slides his hand down over Vergil’s, to still his fingers. “Let me.” 

Slowly, Dante sinks down where he’s always belonged: on his knees before his brother, looking up at him with adoration and love. His hands frame the iliac crests of his brother’s hips, thumbs tracing over them with a slow, sensual brush of appreciation, before he lets his fingers dip towards the fastenings of Vergil’s pants. 

It’d be so easy for him to rush into this, to rip open the front of Vergil’s pants and have his mouth wrapped around his cock in seconds. But he wants to remember this, every second of it. He wants to savor it, to live in the moment the way he never did before. He was always so desperate to devour, to consume his brother whole. He never did learn how to properly worship him the way Vergil truly deserved. 

Vergil breathes out at the sight, the glorious, long-denied image of his broad-shouldered brother before him once more, ravenous and gorgeous, rapt and on his knees.

There is something changed in his approach, something mindful, almost tender. Certainly sensual and unhurried. Dante leans forward, sighing as he presses a soft, tender kiss to the taut skin of Vergil’s stomach, just beneath his navel. His tongue traces its way south, as his fingers slowly pull open the folds of fabric that conceal his brother’s cock. 

Vergil is intrigued, and beneath that, somewhere, even moved. He feels himself tremble.

“You cannot imagine,” he says, on a hitched breath, driving his fingers into his brother’s hair once more, “how many times I envisioned this moment.”

Dante exposes his aching cock to the air, and he shudders, letting his head fall back.

Vergil’s scent fills the air—a dark, heady musk that immediately overwhelms. It crashes down on Dante and slams into his lungs, a devastating tsunami that decimates every last shred of self-control as he breathes his brother in. 

He should’ve expected it, he really should’ve braced himself—but he was utterly unprepared for it—how it would make him feel. He thought he had managed to get his shit together, that this was something he’d be able to do just fine—but it hits him the moment he breathes in his brother’s wonderful scent: Vergil smells exactly like what Dante remembers. His cock hasn’t changed at all either, even if the rest of him has. Dante would recognize it anywhere—long and thick, glistening beautifully at the swollen tip, waiting for his mouth. 

He’d spent a lifetime conjuring up this vision of his brother when he was alone. Dreaming of him, when he didn’t have him to worship anymore. He pictured him—beautiful and young, lit up by the light of the pale moon, standing before him just like this.

But this isn’t a dream anymore. He isn’t alone, on the couch at night, with only the past to keep him company and his hand to keep him warm. He’s really here, on his knees before his brother, with Vergil’s hand in his hair. On his knees before his brother, but all he can think is that he doesn’t deserve this at all. He doesn’t deserve to worship his brother. He doesn’t deserve his forgiveness or his love. But Vergil lets him kneel before him. Lets him serve, even though Dante hasn’t properly atoned.

He takes a shuddering breath as he swallows hard past the constriction in his throat, desperately clutching at the unraveling threads of himself. 

Dante grasps his brother’s cock at the root, his fingers slowly, sensually pulling back the velvet foreskin to expose the ruddy glans. He glances up at Vergil who gazes back, lips parted, low-lidded, and then lets his tongue lap over the tip in a slow lick. 

His brother’s taste fills his mouth—salty and bitter and perfect and raw, and fuck, _fuck_. It’s just like it was, before the fall. Vergil tastes exactly like what Dante remembers, and for a shocking, disorienting moment, it’s almost as though it’s twenty-four years ago once more. 

But they aren’t nineteen anymore. 

And they can never regain their lost years. 

Dante’s breath stutters in his throat as he looks up at his brother and lets his tongue slick around the circumference of the head, his body trembling as he tries to contain the visceral grief that suddenly seizes him by the throat. Vergil looks down on him with eyes that are filled with so much love and warmth, steady fingers stroking through his hair with such tender devotion. He almost wishes Vergil would grip his hair with a little more viciousness. Look at him with a little more violence. But instead, Vergil looks at him with unbridled love and Dante has no hope of defending himself against something so powerful. 

That’s all it takes to make Dante lose it, completely. 

His eyes well up with tears, and he starts to panic, because this is definitely not how he had wanted this to go—with tears streaming down his face as he tries to properly service his brother’s cock for the first time in twenty-four years. 

“Easy, Dante.”

Vergil realizes what’s happening a beat too late, but reacts at once, moving his hand from his brother’s hair to his shoulder, gripping there, firmly but gently, reinforcing the words.

“Perhaps it’s too soon.” 

He wonders if it will always be too soon; the wounds too raw to be debrided.

He can feel himself throb in Dante’s grasp, and wills his blood to calm its thundering.

“Shit,” Dante curses as he ruefully rubs at an eye with the back of his free hand, his breath harsh and ragged as it eases out over the delicate skin of his brother’s cock. “I’m sorry.” He knows this isn’t what Vergil must have envisioned at all—his little brother on his knees, crying as he tries to suck him off. This couldn’t possibly be at all what Vergil would want—a reminder of just how broken Dante has become over the long, hard years without his brother’s love. 

“I’m sorry,” he repeats again, looking up at Vergil through the storm in his eyes. “Please, you gotta let me try. It’s not too soon, brother,” he pleads with a shaking breath. “It’s been too long.”

Vergil nods with momentary difficulty. “I understand.”

He does. Perhaps the sheer magnitude of their suffering and loss is less pronounced in him, obscured by the wintry composure of his person, but it is there just below the snow, nonetheless, and none the less.

“Take as long as you need.” His hand finds Dante’s hair again and begins a firm and stirring caress against his scalp, the force of his fingers reassuring, bracing. His other hand grasps the base of his cock and eases the soft head slowly over his brother’s lips and lower face, heedless of the tear tracks there; a blurred and sensuous caress. “Take as much as you need.”

Dante makes a sound that’s almost a whimper as his lips part for his brother, his eyes gazing up at him with bone-deep gratitude. He’s relieved that Vergil is granting him this mercy, allowing him to properly attempt to worship him, to prove to him the depth of his devotion, to earn his place once more at his brother’s feet. He bows his head forward, chest heaving as he runs his hands up his brother’s thighs in a slow, loving stroke, grasping him by the hips as Vergil’s cock presses into his mouth. He shudders as he laves his tongue along the underside of hot, turgid flesh. Vergil anoints him with the heady emanation of his desire, which pools onto his awaiting tongue. 

Tears streak down his face and Dante ignores them in favor of allowing saliva and slick to mix with them as he suckles his lips over the head and licks his way down the shaft with a slow, tender brush of his tongue.

He dips his unsteady fingers into the waistband of Vergil’s pants and tugs them further down, his heart giving a sharp throb in his chest when he realizes that Vergil had groomed himself quite well. He had trimmed himself neatly, and shaved the delicate skin of his testicles bare—an invitation for his little brother to offer up his devotion with his mouth, despite professing earlier that he had believed himself to have off killed Dante’s love. 

Dante must prove to him just how wrong that belief was; he trembles as he bows his head low, his fingers tenderly stroking up the slick length of his brother’s cock, pumping slowly. His lips glide over the velvety, soft skin of Vergil’s balls, and then he opens his mouth and lets his tongue slide out, breath shuddering as he sucks one into his mouth, rolling his tongue around it, and then the other. It’s sensual and slow, the way he shows his gratitude for being allowed to perform such a sacred rite.

He is a sinner before his god and Dante knows he’ll never earn absolution; that no amount of worship can ever wash away his brother’s blood on his hands.

But for the first time in a lifetime, on his knees he’s found purpose. On his knees, he’s rediscovered his reason for being, the only one that ever truly mattered in the end. 

The feeling is as overwhelming as the desire in his blood, as staggering as the breadth of his love which knows no bounds and stretches wider than the entire universe. It pulses through his veins and quakes through his limbs, and Dante lets out a sound, bewildered and raw, as tears cascade relentlessly down his cheeks, and he tries to slide his tongue up along the sensitive seam of Vergil’s balls. Tries to sloppily kiss his way back up, desperate to regain any modicum of self-control. But by the time he has his mouth wrapped around Vergil’s cock once more, he’s shaking, nearly blinded by love and by grief and all that falls in between. 

It’s too much.

He should’ve known better than to think he could have had any hope of controlling what he had tried to bury for more than half his life. It pours out of him, a brutal flood, all at once—pain and joy and need and desire and the agony of a loss so great it had been unbearable; a mourning that never knew an end; a sorrow that never knew relief. And underneath it all beats the bleeding heart of love, so much of it he’d almost forgotten he was capable of feeling something so visceral, forgotten how it even felt to be so full of it, love; love that lives and breathes, alive in a way he hasn’t been since he let his brother fall. 

Dante sobs and Vergil’s cock slips out of his mouth, smearing against his cheek as he careens forward and presses his forehead against his brother’s hip, hands clutching at his thighs, desperate and full of despair at not being able to complete the divine act he’d wanted so badly to fulfill. 

Vergil feels Dante’s emotions hit him like a blast, simultaneous to his brother’s soft impact, the collision of Dante’s brow against his loins, the grieving grasp of his hands. He breathes out, centering himself, wrestling them down, banishing their unwieldy agony, sublimating them under the iron grip of his mind.

“Dante,” he manages, after a moment. He can hear the faintly labored way he speaks; his voice roughened at the edges by a visceral empathy he dares not fully succumb to. “Enough.”

He subjugates it all, mercilessly, beneath the power of his presence and self-control, leaving him calm and composed, quietly compassionate, as he grasps Dante’s shoulders and urges him to rise. “Come back to me.”

“Fuck, Verge, I’m sorry,” Dante says between hitched, shaking breaths, unable to quite look up at his brother as he drags a hand over his face. “I just— It’s been so long—” 

Vergil stoops and takes hold of his brother; wraps his arms around him and hauls him upright. Dante’s face falls against his neck, tears falling hot against his skin. “Don’t apologize,” he says, as he holds Dante for a moment, gazing over his shoulder, unseeing. One arm is slung around his brother’s waist, gripping him tightly, the other hand clasps the back of his head, crushing his bright hair with tender violence. Dante’s body shakes in his arms, and Vergil knows he is silently sobbing. He closes his eyes and says nothing for a time, merely absorbs his brother’s quiet convulsions, and waits to feel him calming. “Don’t apologize for loving me.” 

For a little while, they stand in the brutal grip of the storm.

It takes some time, but eventually, it passes, and the tears recede. 

Dante almost opens his mouth to apologize again when he finally catches his breath. But he rethinks it and closes his mouth, sniffling slightly as he presses wet eyes against his brother’s shoulder. He tightens his grip around Vergil’s waist, taking comfort in the resonance of their blood, and the synchronization of their hearts, the way they breathe together as one. 

“I do, you know,” he says into the silence, his voice rough with emotion. “Love you.” He swallows thickly as his hand slides up his brother’s back. “More than anything.” 

Vergil closes his eyes, savors the words. It’s not that Dante’s never said them before, but he’s never heard them from this Dante, the strong, irreverent, ruthless, haunted man he holds now. “I know, Dante. I know.”

He turns his face against his brother’s ear. “It’s late. Take me to bed, my brother. My love. Let me fall asleep to your heartbeat. Tomorrow, we’ll begin again.”

*

They fall asleep in each other’s arms, leaving the storm raging outside, where it belongs. 

Rain beats down on cobblestone. Thunder claps across the night sky, rattling all the windows. 

It is quiet and still inside. Neither of them stir, as their hearts beat together after a lifetime of separation, steady and slow. Their breaths are even and calm, their bodies entwined beneath the covers. They find each other in their dreams, which are quiet beneath the endless sky. 

And for the first time since the fall, they feel at peace. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Coming like a hurricane, I take it in real slow  
>  The world is spinning like a weather vane  
> Fragile and composed  
> I am breaking down again  
> I am aching now to let you in_   
>  [Hurricane - Fleurie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD9zp18Zp_8)

Vergil doesn’t open his eyes right away. Instead he lies for a time, still and meditative, letting reality reassert itself. He is aware of his brother’s slumbering limbs, warm and pleasantly heavy over his own, as he slowly eases from the torpor of his first real, human sleep in years. 

When his lids stir at last, he finds the sky still dark, though the bedside clock confirms it is morning. The rain is a roaring lullaby, white and torrential, pelting down upon the city without mercy. He can see little beyond the deluged glass of the arched bedroom window; the downpour is relentless.

After a moment he hears a crack of distant thunder.

He feels little desire to rise.

Dante is dead to the world, his face half-mashed against Vergil’s chest, his breath ghosting over the skin, cast lightly as spidersilk. The scent of his body is intoxicating; drowsy, warm masculinity in repose. Once more, Vergil is quietly overcome—by the surreality of their situation, and surroundings. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t all a dream. He had woken, regrettably, from many such dreams in the demon world. Dreams where he reconciled with his brother, dreams where they were here again, in Dante’s domicile.

He turns his face against Dante’s thick, unruly hair, breathing it in, then lowers his lips to press a kiss to his brother’s forehead, which is smooth and untroubled in his slumber.

Dante stirs, making a soft, sleepy sound as his arm unconsciously winds tight around Vergil’s waist, and then settles once more, lulled back into the depths of sleep by the reassuring rhythm of his brother’s heart. He is unguarded and open in a way that seems almost unnatural; in the demon world, he would wake from a distant sound on the horizon. But here, in his brother’s arms, not even the deafening boom of thunder outside the windows can rouse him. 

The solid, hard line of his body is pressed flush alongside Vergil’s, one leg carelessly slid in between his brother’s. Sleep had done little to temper his desire. Dante’s cock is awake, even if his mind isn’t—standing hard and full, pressed lightly against Vergil’s hip. 

Vergil is amused by this, but not surprised. He shifts, easing himself languidly over his brother. Dante rolls without resistance, moving automatically to accommodate the change, unconsciously anticipating Vergil’s movement, just as he would in a fight. Vergil smiles as he settles between his brother’s strong thighs and stares down at his face—insensate, lips parted, starting to form a drowsy and embryonic smile of their own.

Vergil gazes at that for a moment, then dips his head and puts a slow, languorous kiss there. 

He’s rewarded with a sleepy, pleased murmur as Dante wakes with the kiss, lips slowly responding before he’s even fully awake. He sighs into the kiss contentedly, a hand finding its way up into his brother’s hair as Vergil kisses the sleep out of his mouth. 

“Morning…” he mumbles between kisses.

“Our first,” intones Vergil.

There is something significant about waking in his brother’s arms for the first time in so many years—yet another resurrection.

There were no mornings in the demon world. It was catch as catch can, when they laid their heads down and languished in half-sleep. But without the demarcations of night and sunlight, the hours ran together like watercolor. At the end of their sojourn, it all felt like one very long, strange day.

Another crash of thunder sounds, and lightning follows. But this is the human world, and they are sheltered and warm; the elements are elsewhere.

Dante blinks the sleep out of his eyes as he looks up into his brother’s in the grey light of morning, and wakes into a distant storm. 

His hand gently sweeps down from where it’d been plunged into Vergil’s hair, caressing his brother’s face tenderly. 

He’d dreamt of this countless times throughout the years—waking and finding himself in his brother’s arms. Vergil would look at him just like he is now—with eyes that are soft and filled with love. He never thought a morning would come when he would open his eyes, and find his brother here, solemn and serene and beautiful. 

Dante’s heart gives a hard pulse as he gently brushes back errant wisps of silver that had fallen across his brother’s brow. “Seems like there are a whole lotta firsts we get to have again,” he murmurs quietly, almost contemplatively, as he tilts his chin up and slowly kisses Vergil.

“Indeed,” says Vergil, against his brother’s lips. “Every cloud has a silver lining. I’m pleased you’re beginning to see this.”

Vergil breaks the kiss, withdrawing with excruciating slowness. Dante follows immediately, as Vergil knew he would. His palm is already against his brother’s chest, checking him gently but firmly.

Dante watches him with light, awakening eyes, unsure of his intent but game as ever.

Vergil braces him back, with an ominous smile, before leaning in to kiss a slow trail down his brother’s well-cut chest. The skin is warm and responsive beneath his lips. Their blood has been content and slumbering, but he can already feel it rousing, stirring, calling. It grows more and more intense, the closer he gets to Dante’s loins.

Dante’s eyes follow him as he journeys south, his breath quickening as Vergil’s lips blaze their way down his body. His heart thunders with quiet anticipation, his fingers slowly sliding up Vergil’s arms and brushing over his shoulders before gently carding into his hair. 

Vergil exhales, savoring his brother’s touch, as he eases down Dante’s body, coming level with his taut hips, and the broad, aching evidence of his brother’s desire. Everything here is carved and hard—from the lines of Dante’s hips to the powerful flare of his thighs, to the cock itself—a glorious marvel, a specimen of curve and contour that pleases his eyes as much as his carnal senses. 

Vergil breathes out again, as he beholds it—and then holds it, letting his fingers stroke over the turgid length, feeling the vellum glide of the foreskin, thumb easing up the seam and under the corona, appreciating the sensitive architecture, like ornaments on an edifice. Dante tenses with an eager nervousness under his touch, his eyes rapt as he watches, lips parted slightly. 

His brother is beautiful everywhere. 

Strapping, too. The weapon matches the man. It feels like an eternity since he’s held this priceless object. Even Yamato has never felt so natural in his hand, or responded so lovingly to his touch.

_How did I never see that Father also left me you?_

“How about a kiss from your big brother?” Vergil’s voice is low; sultry and wry, and that seems to do the trick—Dante’s lips quirk up with a grin and the tension that had formed in his body eases out as he relaxes. 

“Thought you’d never ask,” Dante softly murmurs, tongue flicking out to moisten his lips. 

Dante’s nether-musk is primal and compelling, rough with sin and salt and sulfur, hot and pungent with notes of dark sex like the deep sea—pheromones that must have evolved for Vergil alone.

His brother’s cock is alive, effusive under his touch, already issuing viscous beads of fluid like dew. Vergil rubs his thumb across the slit, toying with the slickness there. He gazes at it, rapt, for a moment, then leans in to lap the welling fluid, swirling it over the glans. It tastes of exquisite salt, too, and feels luxuriant against his tongue. 

Dante quietly groans, heat flooding through his body as arousal flares sharp and bright. It’s only a lick, a single swipe of tongue, but that’s all it takes for a shudder to break out onto the surface of his skin and work its way down his spine. Vergil had been the first and the last to ever claim this part of him; the only one he’d ever allowed to make love to him quite like this, to hold him in such an intimate way. 

He almost can’t believe that this is really happening now. Some part of him tells himself that he doesn’t deserve it—especially given the events of the previous night; but he immediately shuts that thought down before it can fully form. The last thing he wants is to let himself fall back into the unforgiving grip of the storm he was swept up in, to let it rend him to pieces. 

The only kind of falling apart Dante should be doing is the kind that Vergil enjoys—when he comes apart, shaking, beneath Vergil’s hands or his tongue or around his cock. 

At first he is slow, measured. Vergil teases the length, letting his lips caress it, letting his tongue circle the head after each slow, loving stroke. He lets his adoration be unvarnished, as he tends his brother’s piece, every bit as mindful and reverent as when he hones Yamato. He grasps Dante’s balls, worries them gently as he works the shaft.

“Fuck, Verge…” Dante gasps out softly, his eyes filled with shining reverence as he looks down upon his brother, body humming with sweet, aching pleasure as he struggles to keep his hips still beneath Vergil’s ministrations. His fingers tighten gently in Vergil’s hair as his breath shudders out of his lips.

Vergil’s hunger surges in a quiet, violent way. His brother’s response is everything he needed, everything he imagined under swirling nightmare skies, staring up blindly as he found his pleasure in his own hand. Even crumbling and corrupt, the only thing that ever moved him was his well-worn memories of Dante.

Now he is pristine, reborn, untouched by any man or act of love.

It is fitting that this should be the first of them.

Vergil hesitates no longer. He surges forth, devouring his brother’s cock down to the root, feeling the sensual graze of silver netherhair against his lips and nose. It responds, seeming to swell even more, the blood inside hectic and holy, and Vergil pulls back and does it again, letting Dante’s glans slam against the back of his throat, pressing his tongue hard along the shaft as he plunges and withdraws. 

Dante cries out, loud and unabashed, as his blood roars with the exquisite pleasure of having Vergil claim him like this. His hips jerk up of their own accord as his back arches and he fucks straight up into the sweltering, wet heat of his brother’s voracious mouth. 

Vergil’s hunger for him is terrifying, awe-inspiring, and all Dante can do is surrender and allow himself to be consumed. Vergil’s mouth tears a keening moan out of him as heat courses through his blood and his fingers tighten viciously in his brother’s hair. Dante’s fingers seize against his scalp, and Vergil groans around his brother’s cock. He redoubles his vigor, working the thick, hot shaft as it thrusts beyond his lips, as Dante pumps his hips and holds his head fiercely, unable to control his response. 

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” Dante gasps out as his head rolls back, his cock sliding into his brother’s mouth. There’s a whine trapped in the back of his throat as Vergil swallows him whole, and Dante’s fingers give a harsh jerk in his brother’s hair, as a violent tremble quakes all the way through the entire length of his body. 

Vergil’s hand reaches beneath, as he eases a finger into his brother’s ass, and Dante lets out another harsh curse. He feels Dante arch and go rigid for a beat, and pulls back to breathe. “Go on, little brother. Give me everything you have.” 

Dante looks down at his brother, overcome by the vision before him. Vergil’s lips are swollen and wet and red, parted lewdly as they brush over the head of his cock. His eyes blaze up at him with a dark hunger brewing beneath the pale, cool surface of his gaze. And yet, even debauched as he is, with his hair utterly wrecked in Dante’s fervent grip, Vergil still looks gloriously regal and stunningly composed in the grip of raw hedonism. 

Dante’s cock pulses beneath his brother’s lips, his inner walls clenching around his brother’s finger, and he trembles as he tightens his grip in Vergil’s hair. His brother wants him to give him everything in this moment—something he’s never quite asked of him in the past. But if this is what Vergil wants, then Dante will give him his all. With a sharp inhale of breath, Dante plunges past his brother’s lips, moaning as Vergil immediately takes him all the way down, swallowing every inch of him with a furious, primal hunger that Dante feels in the deepest part of himself. He cries out his brother’s name as he brutally drives in, dragging Vergil’s face down against him with a violent fistful of silver silk.

Dante’s vigor is exhilarating, as is the hot, unyielding hardness of his flesh and its merciless incursion. Vergil is unfazed by the roughness of the act; he’s taken worse punishment from his brother a hundred times over. It does not move him to be used like this, not as it seems to move Dante. He is not passive in this act, but full of equal and opposite agency, lunging, swallowing his brother’s cock voraciously, giving as good as he gets.

He savors it; this base collision of their equally matched natures. Parity. This is what moves him. That, and Dante’s uninhibited sounds, guttural and animal, as he comes undone. In the moment, his brother is no longer chained to the past, to regret, to unbearable sorrow. Vergil knows he needs this—permission, absolution.

His brother’s native language is physical, and while Vergil does not consider it his own primary tongue, he is surely fluent. 

Dante surrenders himself recklessly to the heat of his brother’s mouth. He loses himself in the visceral rush of blood in his veins and the pounding between his thighs and the way Vergil feasts upon him, devouring him whole. He’s so swept up by his brother’s ravenous need for him that he can barely manage to form anything that might be a semblance of a thought—too caught up by the rawness of the feeling, the immediacy of his breath, the way his brother claims his cock and his body and his pleasure as _his_. 

_You are mine,_ Vergil seems to tell him with his eyes, his lips, his tongue. _You’ve always been mine,_ he reminds him as he swallows Dante all the way down. Dante whimpers as his back arches and his thrusts grow jerky and uneven as the furious heat swirling inside of him starts to coalesce in the pit of his belly. 

“Vergil— Verge— I’m close, fuck, I’m close—” It’s a desperate warning. 

Dante gasps as he tries to pull his brother off his cock, pushing himself up onto his elbows.

Vergil is amused. Dante’s strong hands, long used to wielding massive weapons, seem curiously weak in the moment. He easily ignores his brother’s clumsy, lust-addled protests and regrips Dante’s cock at its thick, turgid base, pounding it faster now, in and out of his mouth, lips kissing his own fist with each stroke.

He slips another finger in beside the first, and curves them in a beckoning gesture, striking Dante in the cryptic soft spot on the hidden inner wall he’s carved his name into a hundred times. All the graffiti here is his; his elegant calligraphy adorns the walls of his brother’s temple, indelible.

His fingertips feel the give, the yield of the sacred place, and he exploits this vulnerability without mercy. Dante is all angles and bravado, but he is softest here, where angels fear to tread.

Vergil is no angel.

He pulls back, lips parted, breathless and bee-stung, just long enough to meet his brother’s gaze, hazed and hedonic. “Come for me, Dante. Be my first.”

It strikes true and sure, a lightning bolt straight to Dante’s core, and his voice tears out of him like a thunder roar, as the storm outside shakes the world and the one inside rips him apart at the seams, and makes him come undone. His spine arches as his head snaps back, the entire line of his body drawing taut, every muscle tensing for a staggering beat of his heart, and he’s coming hard, his body a wild wave of motion, nearly sobbing from the overwhelming pleasure as he pulses hot and wet into the depths of his brother’s glorious, hungry mouth. 

Vergil is flooded, all at once; both by Dante’s voluble emotions and his voluminous issue, which erupts at just the right juncture in the stroke, pleasing him immensely. _Elegant_. He swallows without missing a beat, but there are several pulses after that, fresh hot volleys of thick bittersweet salt like liquid satin. Despite his best efforts, a trickle overflows his lips as he watches his brother’s magnificent convulsions, his muscled body never more stunning in any act than this one.

It feels like it goes on forever, a hurricane without end or mercy, and Dante is swept right off the shore, deep into the hot, frothy roar of the surge. He goes with the tide, pulled into the undertow, and loses himself in the depths of the waves his brother carries him through. And for a breathless, shining moment, there is only this—a calm at the bottom of the sea; an unearthly, transcendent sense of peace. And love, deeper than any ocean; more powerful than any storm.

When he finally breaks to the surface, he opens his mouth and takes his first real breath in twenty-four years. 

It’s a gasping, ragged thing, shaped around the sound of his brother’s name, and Dante shudders as the last of his orgasm ebbs out of him.

Vergil rises to his knees and smoothes his hair back, then licks his lips, slowly stroking Dante’s strong thighs through the aftershocks. The taste of his brother is pleasurably heavy on his tongue, and he savors it, gazing down and admiring the picture Dante makes, wrecked and resplendent in the sheets.

“My apologies, brother,” he murmurs. “I couldn’t stop myself.” 

Dante looks up at his brother in quiet, breathless awe, his blood still humming with the powerful resonance of his orgasm. He feels euphoric, blissed out in a way he hasn’t been in decades. 

Vergil somehow manages to look stunning, even with his lips reddened and salaciously swollen, a rivulet of white running down his chin, droplets glistening on his throat obscenely. 

Dante reaches up with trembling fingers, tenderly caressing his brother’s jaw, and then draws Vergil down to him, kissing him slowly, tasting the bitterness of himself on his brother’s tongue. He luxuriates in the kiss for a moment, then breaks it in favor of letting his lips drag down, his tongue chasing after the effusive product of his desire with a low, content hum. 

Vergil makes a deep, appreciative noise in his throat, angling his neck to facilitate his brother’s depraved little goal, feeling the stroke of Dante’s tongue across his pulse. A shudder chases the motion.

He grasps the back of his brother’s neck and kisses him once more, seeking to tenderly plunder every bit of territory, and reclaim it as his own.

“Mine,” he breathes, as he breaks the kiss. “As ever.”

“Yours,” Dante murmurs, his breath easing out over his brother’s incredible mouth, a faint ghost of a smile forming across his own. “I like the sound of that.” 

He feels grounded and secure, warm in the safety of Vergil’s arms. Steady in a way he hasn’t felt since the fall. He lost himself all those years ago, without a light to guide him home. In Vergil’s arms, he’s found himself again. In Vergil’s arms, he’s found his home—the only place he’s ever truly belonged. His hands travel over his brother’s smooth skin and up into his ridiculously perfect hair, and he kisses him once more, his tongue still eager, still hungry. 

He can feel his brother’s arousal, the heavy weight of it pressing against his thigh. Though he certainly isn’t young anymore, his hunger for his brother is still as insatiable as it ever was; perhaps even more pronounced, now that Vergil has awoken the part of him that had lain buried beneath the loam of the past, shrouded in grief. 

And though Dante might always mourn all that they had lost, in this moment, he’s living in the present; he’s able to let the past settle, to walk upon its shifting foundations without being dragged back down into its dark, terrible depths. He can turn his face toward the future, and let the all-encompassing power of his brother’s love suffuse him and warm him. He can walk away from the edge of the abyss he’d been standing over for half his life, hand-in-hand with his brother, and look up towards the sky. 

Vergil is alive, and though the past might never die, Dante no longer has to be shackled by it. 

He breaks the kiss to look up at Vergil, the other half of himself. He holds his entire world in his arms, frames his brother’s face with his hands, and gazes into heaven. 

“I need you inside me,” says Dante quietly, his fingers delicately finding their way across his brother’s mouth. “Make us whole again, brother. We’ve waited long enough.”

Vergil’s blood sings at the request. He is silent, reverent.

He reaches for the bottle on the bedside table, one more intimate effect left out in the maelstrom that is his brother’s bedroom. There’s no need to remark on what it is, why it’s there, or what it was for. He knows all too well the lonely hours of fantasy, memory and self-recrimination they’ve both endured over the years.

He also knows that Dante would insist on taking him straight, but there’s no need for that. 

He prepares himself deftly, casually, below his brother’s sight line, slicking his cock while he distracts Dante with kisses. His slick-dipped fingers find his brother’s ass and insinuate themselves into his body once more, twisting gently, easing the passage. Then he settles himself close, in the intimate cradle of Dante’s strong thighs, aligning their bodies. The blood in his cock pounds from the proximity, summoned like a sword. He feels the head abut the soft crepe of the furrow.

“I should have done this in the demon world,” Vergil intones, gazing into his brother’s eyes. “The moment we were alone.”

He leans in, bringing his weight to bear, letting the head breach his brother’s body. 

“I should have laid you down in that infernal field.”

“There’s a lot we should’ve done differently,” Dante says as he slightly cants his hips up, gasping softly as his brother presses deeper in. “But we’re here now.” 

He hooks a hand around the nape of Vergil’s neck and pulls him down, pressing their brows together, as his other hand strokes down the length of his brother’s body and curls around his hip. Their breath mixes sweetly between their mouths, and Dante tilts his chin up, closing the space between them with a kiss. It’s slow, the way he wraps his legs around his brother and draws him home. The way his body shudders as Vergil finds his way back into the deepest part of him.

He thinks he’s been waiting for this moment his entire life—to be finally reunited with his other half. He’s been without him for so long that he’d almost forgotten how sacred this feels—to be so full with his brother; to be made ineffably whole and sanctified by his love, finding grace in the sanctuary of his brother’s arms. He surrenders himself for the taking, both body and soul, trembling as Vergil fills him completely, claiming him as his own. 

Dante’s heart soars as Vergil finally comes to a rest, buried deep inside of him. He breaks their kiss and looks up at his reason for everything, his eyes bright and shining with the unconditional love that beats in his chest and the effervescent joy that lights up his blood. “Welcome home,” he whispers softly with a smile, elation gleaming wet in his eyes.

Vergil breathes out, setting his brow against his brother’s once more. Touching Dante’s face, mindlessly, overcome by his words. It feels as sublime as it once did, to be inside him, held like a holy relic in his powerful body. Dante is warm, welcoming; quietly adoring.

This is where they belong, and always has been—to and with each other. Neither complete without his brother, the counterpart, and counterweight, of his own cloven soul.

When he begins to move at last, it is rolling and slow, elliptical strokes that drive deep, mindful undulations affirming the rightness of his place in his brother’s body, and in his arms.

The pleasure is exquisite, as always, and he groans softly; in the grip of it all, this beautiful obscenity that is their love, this act of gorgeous blasphemy—all their stars uncrossed now, and shining for them alone.

This is what it means to be alive—to feel your heart bursting with an emotion greater than life. To feel it down in your bones, your marrow, your blood—the fullness of being, the sacredness of love, which knows no boundaries, no limits, no end. Not even the gods above or the devils below could imagine the inviolability of your love, or comprehend its transcendent power. How glorious it is to be filled with the hot, beating pulse of your brother, your god, who takes you in his arms and writes his name inside you and reshapes you around himself until you are beautiful and alive once more. 

Their bodies, their hearts, their breaths, their souls all move together in perfect harmony, and the universe that they form with their love sings like the holy resonance of their blood. 

Dante cries out his brother’s name, whispers his love to be swallowed; his fingers tangle in Vergil’s hair, his legs locking his twin in place deep within him. “I love you,” he moans out against Vergil’s mouth as he arches into each stroke. _Love you,_ with every shuddering thrust that sends rivulets of lightning through his blood. _Love you,_ as his sky breaks apart and rains tears of ecstasy down his cheeks. _Love you_ , with every breath in his lungs and every beat of his heart; with every molecule, every atom of himself. 

And in this transcendent moment, there is no longer the pain of loss; no longer an ocean of separation that had condemned their souls to be split in two. No longer any sorrow, or grief, or guilt that had defined every moment of the hollow existence Dante had called a life. He’s clutched in the arms of his entire world, the battered temple of his body consecrated by the only god he’s ever worshiped and served. His heart fills with thunder and his body roars; he wraps his arms around the storm that is his brother, and offers up another fervent prayer of love. 

Vergil is aware of Dante’s cock, rock hard between the slow grind of their stomachs, subject to the friction of each ripple and knot of muscle. Even after years of distance and deprivation, his brother’s appetite seems unchanged—he is as hungry as he was when they were younger, his resources as renewable. Vergil remembers how many times they would make each other come in a single night, a merciless wringing, ruthlessly taunting and prolonged until their utter collapse; not unlike their bouts of combat.

From the signs of his body and the sounds from his lips, Dante is close. Vergil understands why. He feels it too; this reunion is almost too fraught, too poignant, too tart and bittersweet and perfect. They began on the edge of the precipice, and have only inched closer. Only his self-possession keeps him in check, stops him from spending, spilling all that he is inside his brother, his very essence an offering at his altar.

He would open his chest for Dante. He would spill his own blood.

But Dante does not desire his lifeblood—only the life-giving part of him.

Vergil leans in, letting himself be kissed, luxuriating in the moment, and indulging his brother’s breathless, unvarnished affections. It’s not as terrifying as he once believed, bearing the full brunt of Dante’s love.

He presses his lips to his brother’s jaw and closes his eyes, intoning a litany, low and lulling, voice dipped in honey and grit.

“Come, brother. Anoint the space between us, and immolate the distance forever. Consecrate this union. Bind us with your seed.”

Dante shudders, his body quaking as Vergil’s voice wraps around his cock and _strokes._

Vergil pounds into him and drives himself home, so deep, Dante wonders if he’ll never find his way out again—and maybe that’s the way it was always meant to be. Maybe Vergil was always meant to lose himself inside of him, in a way he never had before. Maybe if he finally loses himself like this, he can only ever find himself again in Dante’s arms. Dante can carry his brother with him forever, and will never again lose the part of him that makes him whole—the part that he holds onto with the kind of desperation that he should’ve held on with twenty-four years ago.

His brother’s heart pounds in perfect synchronicity with his own; the heat of his breath warming his skin as he plunges in so deep, it’s all Dante knows—the way Vergil claims every part of him: his breath, his heart, all of himself. He feels it in the depths of him—everything that he had lost all those years ago finding its way back home, filling in and illuminating the darkest, most broken parts of him that he never thought could heal.

All he can feel is the heat of his brother’s body and the thickness of his cock filling up all the tender parts of him that had been ripped out with the fall. His world shudders and shakes around him, and he breaks apart into a million pieces that form around his brother, reworked into something beautiful and whole; something that has never known loss or mourning, that has always already been perfect from the start.

Dante’s orgasm rips through him with so much violence, he almost triggers instantly, infernal heat boiling up under his skin as red lightning courses through his veins. Tears carve down his cheeks and he’s sobbing with relief; with pain and pleasure and love and rage and need so deep, it’s endless, spilling out of him in wave after wave. He can barely even breathe, can’t even get in a gasping breath, as it slams through him brutally, tearing through him like a Judgement Cut, and he shakes and shakes and comes harder than he’s ever come in his entire life, his vision whiting out before it strobes red. Dante teeters dangerously on the precipice as the wave crests and his devil rears its head. 

His blood gives a hard, resonant pulse.

Dante roars as his devil emerges with a shock of lightning, volcanic hot. 

It’s beautiful to Vergil, as always, the transformation. Breathtaking, he would say, if his breath hadn’t already been stolen. Showered in sparks and red lightning, his brother’s body arches in its metamorphosis, seizing around his cock, flowering into gorgeous monstrosity.

Vergil stares at that, rapt, on the verge of imploding. It would be so easy to go with Dante, to let his own demonic half overtake him. But that has always been easy for him.

There is no vulnerability there, no sacrifice or acquiescence.

As Dante transmutes around him, beneath him, in his arms, he shudders, and lets himself embrace his brother’s demon, covering him low and close, thrusting once, twice, three times—each with the slow, deliberate finality and definite finish of a killing stroke.

He comes, with a low, rough cry and a rush of unbearable elation—piercing and human and raw, shooting high and hard inside Dante’s ornate and augmented form, then collapsing atop it, feeling the heat and heartbeat that emanate from beneath the textural, armorlike flesh. Eyes closed, he can feel the glowing rift in Dante’s chest pulsing, lighting up the planes of his face.

Slowly, Vergil strokes the riven cheeks of his brother’s other face, soothing the beast.

His fingers are cool and gentle in their caress and feel incredible against Dante’s burning skin. 

He lets out a low, feral growl deep in the back of his throat as he rides the wave, infernal power surging in his blood and crackling through his skin as his body violently shudders with aftershocks that quake down his thighs and up through the tips of his wings. 

For a moment, there’s a surreal sharpness to his world as he’s thrust into the unearthly calm at the center of the storm. He can feel every throbbing inch of his brother’s cock buried deep within him; Vergil’s hot seed coats his inner walls and spills out of his body, leaking down his thighs. He can hear the rush of blood in his brother’s veins, the susurrations of each breath. He can sense the sheer power of their primal connection humming between their bodies, and soars with it as it pulses hot and bright within him. 

Dante flies high and plummets back down to earth when he reaches the zenith, drawn by the gravity of his brother’s touch. 

The heavy haze of orgasmic euphoria settles into him like a fever. Dante moans softly as his devil recedes, sparks of red lightning sizzling over his skin and between their bodies as humanity begins to reassert itself. 

The smell of brimstone dissipates as Dante’s body shifts beneath Vergil’s once more, easing back into the smooth, taut flesh and muscle he knows best, with its rarified masculine perfume; warm male human, impulsive, effusive. All that bespeaks his brother.

Dante’s fingertips slowly trace up the length of Vergil’s back, sliding into his hair.

Vergil makes an appreciative noise at Dante’s immediate and unhesitating caress. His brother’s transition is instantaneous, like flipping a switch—his human default is tender affection, in spite of his cavalier attitude, and this is where he reverts, the moment his demon withdraws.

“Did you come?” Vergil asks, after a moment, with a dry, languid smile.

Dante makes a quiet, amused sound as he glances down at his brother, and discovers that there’s a white streak splattered across Vergil’s cheek. He reaches out and gently takes his brother’s face in his hand, wiping the obscenity off his skin with a reverent swipe of his thumb. 

“Y’know, I’m not sure, brother,” he says with a smile forming at the corners of his mouth, voice a little thick. “You might just have to fuck me again to be sure.” 

Vergil chuckles and lets his head fall back on Dante’s chest without much ceremony. He can feel the generous slickness pressed between his chest and his brother’s, the hot geyser that had erupted between them still holding its pulsatile warmth. Demonic issue is an interesting substance.

 _I love you._ He remembers Dante uttering the words over and over again, like a mantra, taut and tremulous, as Vergil drove himself inside him. Over and over, until he triggered, dissolved in carnal, guttural, primal ecstasy and lost the ability to speak coherent words. Over and over, until the words almost lost meaning, lost in a senses-dulling flood of hyperbole.

“There’s just one thing I’m not quite clear on,” Vergil intones, amused, nuzzling his brother’s sculpted chest, letting his lips drag along the rise of a hard pectoral. “Do you love me?”

“Seriously?” Dante looks down at Vergil incredulously. “Saying it wasn’t enough? Do I need to beat it into your thick skull again?” He keeps a straight face for only the duration of a heartbeat before a lopsided grin blooms across his mouth as his fingers mindlessly stroke through his brother’s sweat-damp hair. He bends his head down and presses a kiss into Vergil’s hair, trailing a hand down his brother’s back and tightening his arms around him. “Just… gimme a minute to catch my breath first.”

“I have a feeling this could go on forever.”

Vergil fervently hopes this is the case.

He rests his head against Dante’s chest, and gazes into the middle distance. After a moment, his lips part, as a thought occurs to him. “Dante,” he asks quietly. “When you took the job V offered, what did you hope to find?”

It had only been a matter of time before they would have to confront the past. 

Some part of Dante wishes they didn’t have to; it would’ve been easier to keep their eyes turned forward, instead of looking back into the rubble of their past. But he knows that there’s no running from this—eventually, they would have to talk about it. He just wishes it didn’t have to be this moment, when they could’ve been basking in the afterglow of their lovemaking, instead. 

Dante stares up at the cracked ceiling above them for a moment, silence falling between them like morning fog. “I’m not sure,” he admits after a little while. “I guess some part of me hoped that maybe…” Maybe he hadn’t really killed him, after all. Maybe he would come upon his brother, and find him standing there, beautiful and strong and alive. 

That small shred of hope, however impossible, had ignited a fire he thought was long dead. It carried him all the way through that damned tree, until he felt the powerful pulse in his blood that could only be Vergil. 

It made him instantly, infuriatingly aroused. 

But what he saw when he stepped through the jagged crevice into his brother’s hellscape of a throne room wasn’t at all what he had hoped for and expected, but something else. Something that had all of his brother’s power, but none of his true essence. All of his pain, but none of his love. 

Just looking at him made Dante realize how stupid it was for him to have held any small shred of hope at all. 

It’s a painful thing to reflect on.

Dante sighs. “I don’t know, Verge. I wasn’t really thinking hard on it. I just knew I had to find you…” He squirms a little, legs unwinding from around his brother’s body. “Do we really have to talk about this now? I was kinda enjoying the moment…” 

Vergil nods, slowly. “Of course not, Dante. I understand.”

His memories of the event are strange, coming as they do from two sides. Two minds. It will take time to reconcile them, put them into context. He allows they may never align, demon and man, but at least they have conjoined once more. He feels as whole as half a soul can ever be, lying with his brother in a rumpled bed in the wake of such beautiful misdeeds.

What Dante will never understand is that it’s moments like this, intimate and spare, when Vergil can touch his humanity with ungloved hands, that he is unguarded enough to broach such loaded topics as his failings, his regrets—and their checkered past, as brothers and lovers.

Still, he thinks, perhaps it doesn’t matter, now that Dante has embraced him with the fervor of a holy crusade, proving that none of it ever meant more than their bond. Perhaps he should merely be grateful, and not question any of what came before.

“We never have to talk about it again,” he promises, solemnly, after a moment. 

He’d never expected to feel this heaven again—their bodies warm and entwined, heartbeats aligned, the indecent echo of carnal pleasures reverberating in their loins.

It would be easy—too easy—to fall back into each other, and let their desires run wild once more. Dante’s almost tempted to go down that path—his brother’s still half-hard inside him. It wouldn’t take much to stoke that fire again. 

But there’s a quiet finality in Vergil’s voice that gives Dante pause. He sighs, then looks down at his dumbass of an older brother. “I didn’t say I _never_ wanted to talk about it,” he insists with a frown. “I just—” He exhales a slightly frustrated breath through his nose and then stares back up at the ceiling resolutely. “Look, Vergil, this isn’t easy for me,” he finally admits after a halting moment. “I spent more than half my life wishing you were alive. And then one day, out of the blue, some skinny goth kid shows up in my office and tells me that a powerful demon’s about to resurrect, and that his name is Vergil.”

His fingers tighten unconsciously in his brother’s hair. 

“I didn’t really know if I could believe him. I mean—we both know what happened, right?” He laughs, a hollow thing. “But some part of me wanted to believe that it was possible. That maybe you really were alive and that I hadn’t actually—” _killed you._ He stops abruptly, takes a breath. Swallows past the sudden tightness in his throat. When he opens his mouth again, his voice comes out softer. Quieter. “I guess I was hoping I would find you again. The real you. Even if you’d just gone and wiped out half our hometown. And when I got inside that tree and felt your presence, you wanna know the first thing I felt?” 

It wasn’t anger, or disappointment, or anything remotely close to what he should’ve felt at all. 

It was something far more shocking. More visceral. 

Treacherous, really.

“Happiness. I was fucking _happy,_ brother, because I thought I’d get to see your face again.” 

Vergil is silent for a long moment, letting conflicted emotions swell inside him. They are no longer strangers, nor unwelcome, but it hasn’t been long, so he still observes them like a scientist.

“I was happy too,” he says, finally, letting his fingers idly trace his brother’s pulse. “If only to be near you again. Even only a part of me. Even if you would never know it. For that short time, when I thought I was dying.”

He pauses, feeling a sudden ache in his chest.

“Even had I failed, I would have died sweetly, had I crumbled to death at your feet.”

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	3. Chapter 3

The truth is brutal.

It always is.

It’s a blow to the chest, a stab to the gut.

Dante reels with it.

He closes his eyes and drops his face into his brother’s hair, breathing him in as he tightens his embrace. He hadn’t thought about it much at all. He’d been so caught up in the moment with Vergil, with having him back again, that he hadn’t had much of a chance to reflect on V.

Had he known that V was a part of his brother, had he even been able to recognize it—maybe things would have gone a little differently. He sure as hell wouldn’t have turned his back on him so many times. Walked away from him without a second thought. Chasing after the other half of Vergil, when the part of his brother that loved him stood right beside him, and he didn’t recognize him at all.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks after a long stretch of silence, the words murmured into Vergil’s hair. “Who you really were.”

Vergil laughs softly. Dante’s breath in his hair is a minor revelation, no less novel now than it was last night, and he can’t help but luxuriate in it, despite the solemn topic. “Would you have believed me?” The words roll, indulgent, from his throat, and leave his tongue like treacle. “I doubt I’d have recognized myself. Considering he was only half of me...and a mere quarter of us _._ ”

Vergil isn’t wrong—Dante certainly wouldn’t have believed V. Not at first, anyway; definitely not without any kind of irrefutable evidence. And while it wouldn’t have been an easy thing to swallow—looking at a part of his brother that looked nothing like him at all—at least he would have known.

“Yeah, I probably would’ve had a pretty hard time wrapping my head around it all,” Dante admits quietly, his nose still buried in soft silver hair. “But…knowing that I had part of you with me would’ve been better than thinking I didn’t have any part of you at all.”

“But you know it now,” says Vergil. “Isn’t that cold comfort? That I was with you, always. Loving you, but softly, at a remove.”

He shifts, stretching, letting himself cover his brother more languorously, smiling down at him in an almost lazy way.

“Besides,” he murmurs, “we both know how these things end, with you and I. My lust for you would have been utter, and yours for me...incomplete.”

Dante looks up at his brother for a long beat. He raises his hand to curl around the side of Vergil’s neck, thumb brushing against his jaw. His brother’s pulse beats strong against his palm. “It’s not incomplete anymore,” he whispers, gazing into Vergil’s eyes.

“No,” says Vergil, inclining his head to better feel his brother’s touch. “It’s certainly not.”

He gazes down at Dante for a moment, curiously. “Funny that in all the times I ran you through with Yamato, it never separated your soul. It must only work when done to oneself. Or perhaps it only works for me. I really don’t know.”

He is aware that he’s still inside his brother, still half-hard, his cock quietly and unobtrusively pulsing, like a simmer on the back burner.

“But it does make me wonder, brother...what your V is like.”

“Hard to say,” Dante says lightly. “But I know what he _wouldn’t_ be like.” He pauses and then grins playfully. “A skinny goth kid who reads poetry.” He chuckles softly as he cards his hand through Vergil’s hair. “Gotta say though, Vergil, I prefer this version of you more.”

“You’d be a fat kid who loves pizza,” drawls Vergil.

“Hey, pizza’s great!” Dante protests, his features rearranging into a caricature of someone deeply offended. “You wound me, brother,” he declares. Yet despite his words, he drags his brother down towards him.

Vergil lets Dante pull him down. It’s where he wants to be anyway. “I prefer the real me as well,” he murmurs. “As did V.”

Dante’s lips quirk with amusement. “ _Finally,_ something we agree on.”

They fall into a comfortable silence, gazing into each other’s eyes.

After a moment, Vergil laughs quietly, unable to shake the image. “A fat kid called ‘D’ who keeps a slice of pepperoni in his pocket to eat during battles. I want you to stab yourself right now just to see if I’m right.”

“Y’know, I’m starting to think you’re developing a new kink, fantasizing like that,” Dante dryly drawls. “Why don’t you hand me the Yamato and we can find out? Just don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”

“Eh, that’s all right. I don’t need to hear an evening of endless guitar solos from your demon side. Besides, my inner goth kid and your inner fat kid seem to be getting along just fine where they are.”

Vergil runs a slow index finger down the stark relief of his brother’s glorious abdomen, deliberately marking each ripple of muscle. “Still,” he murmurs, amused, “you should be grateful for that devil metabolism.”

“You’d still love me even if I didn’t have a rockin’ bod and spent all day eating pizza, wouldn’t ya?” It’s not really a question.

Vergil shrugs. “You still loved me when I was a hideous tentacle monster, so I’d say you have a lot of latitude. Go ahead; let yourself go.”

Dante’s eyes soften, along with his voice. “You knew?”

He hadn’t thought that Vergil’s demon was even capable of understanding love. After all, he didn’t seem to remember anything at all about their childhood or their home; all he wanted was power, absolute.

And yet, even as Dante stood there, staring up at the monstrosity made flesh from his brother’s nightmarish hunger for power, all he could feel was love, beating beneath the rage and the grief and the horror of what would surely come to pass between them.

“Of course I knew.” Vergil is strangely aware of both parts of himself concerning that interlude; it is an impossible schism, a pair of narratives he cannot reintegrate or quite reconcile, but instead must hold apart, like separate transcripts. “I always knew, Dante. How could it be otherwise between us? The Qliphoth was two dozen long-stemmed roses, brother, strange as it may sound.”

Dante’s face scrunches up in consternation. “You could’ve just gotten me the damn roses instead.”

Vergil smirks, but then he considers it. “Perhaps. Perhaps I could have. Perhaps I could have played you a sonata, instead of raising a tower. Yet you never seemed to appreciate that side of me, brother. Why do you think my demon does anything? What do you think Temen-ni-gru was, if not a grand gesture?” Vergil averts his eyes. “Urizen wanted your attention. He wanted you to come for him.”

A sly smile touches Vergil’s lips a fraction of a beat later. “He still does.”

“I don’t need grand gestures, Vergil,” Dante says quietly. “Never did.”

It seems fitting that they’re having this conversation while Vergil is still buried inside of him.

Dante’s fingers gently caress his brother’s cheek. “The only thing I ever wanted is right here. Just like this.”

“Ah yes. Indeed, you are low-maintenance.” Vergil’s voice is arid, but amused.“I certainly won’t make any more grand gestures, at the risk of offending your humble sensibilities, brother.”

Dante has only ever wanted to speak a single, unvarnished language—one that shapes the endless limits of their love. One that doesn’t require much more than his brother’s presence, and the security of being in his arms.

It’s a simple need, easily satisfied.

He has never needed a grandiloquent expression of love; he’s only ever wanted to hold it close. To feel it underneath his hands and inside his body and anywhere his eyes could behold. He never needed or wanted his brother to erect a tower in his name; never needed his brother to conquer the world for him. He only ever wanted this: Vergil’s eyes looking at him. Vergil’s hands on his skin. Vergil’s body, pressed against his own. Vergil’s cock, deep inside of him.

Vergil’s mouth, against his own, which he claims again with a slow simmering kiss.

Their tongues brush and Dante moans with quiet appreciation, then breaks the kiss to look up at his brother. Their breath mingles in the scant space between their mouths.

“The only grand gesture you need to make, brother, is staying here with me.”

Vergil tilts his head.“I had thought about making you dinner, too, but clearly such things are meaningless.”

Dante just stares at Vergil for a moment. “Now you’re just splitting hairs,” he protests. “Making dinner means you decided to stay, and that’s the only thing I ever wanted, asshole.” He gives his brother a wry grin.

“I told you I was staying, Dante.” Vergil’s voice is calm, quiet, sober.  No doubt this will have to be said a time or two, before it becomes an accepted truth. He knows that even Dante would be hard-pressed to deny his honor. Even in Nelo Angelo’s grotesque form, his brother had somehow felt that part of his nature, resonating, and remarked upon it. “I’ve left in the past, it’s true, but you know I’ve never broken a promise.”

Dante's gaze slides off Vergil’s face as his smile fades. “You’ve broken one.”

It was a promise made in the dead of night, when they were only eight years old.

_Promise me you won’t ever leave._

_Of course I won’t._

Vergil couldn’t have known that within the space of a few short months, they would be ripped apart from one another.

“Can’t really hold you to that, though.” Dante’s eyes trail back to his brother, meeting his eyes. “You probably don’t even remember. It was a long time ago...”

“Ah, yes,” Vergil says, with a small, funny smile that isn’t exactly light. “When we were children. I remember. It was storming then, too.”

Surprise lights upon Dante’s face. “Huh. You _do_ remember.”

He hadn’t thought it was something Vergil would’ve considered formative or important; it certainly couldn’t have had as much meaning to his brother as it did to him. Or so he thought.

Vergil frowns. “Of course I do. You were very upset. I was a child then, not a monster. You were my little brother, and I felt very sure of my ability to protect you, from the storm, from your fears. It was only a nightmare, after all.” He sighs, aware of the irony of hindsight. “I couldn’t have imagined what was coming when I made that promise. But you’re right; I did break it.”

“Yeah, but I can’t really blame you for it,” Dante admits as one corner of his mouth tilts up faintly. “I never have.” At least, not for breaking the promise the first time, when it wasn’t even a choice Vergil had made of his own accord. But he certainly didn’t have an excuse for all the times that came after. He never stayed, no matter how often Dante asked—pleaded—when they were younger.

“Just… do me a favor, Vergil,” he says, quietly, gazing up at Vergil. “Tell me you really mean it this time.”

“Dante,” Vergil says, low and sudden and intense. He grasps his brother’s face and looks into his eyes. “If I could go back to that night, I would change that promise. I would promise that no matter what, I’d never leave. But that if I was taken, I’d always return to you.”

In truth, he hadn’t left. They had been parted by forces beyond their grasp or control. “And Dante...you were taken from me, too.”

“You chose to fall, Verge,” Dante reminds him, emotion glinting harshly in his eyes and clenching in his throat. “So you woulda broken the promise in the end, anyway, cuz you weren’t really taken from me that time, or all the fucking times that came before. You _left._ ”

“Tell me something,” Vergil says quietly. “Do you think I’d have done the same things, if not for the attack? Do you think the fall was inevitable, even had we never lost our mother? Even had we never lost each other?”

“Of course not.”

“So how can you say that? That I’d have broken my promise in the end?” Vergil gazes at Dante’s face, searching, knowing his emotions show on his face more now than perhaps they did, once. The split, it seemed, had brought certain things to the surface. “It’s storming,” he said. “And you’re in my arms. Just like you were that night. Ask me again.”

Dante could argue with him. Could tell him that he’s wrong. That Vergil broke his promise to him, over and over—so many times, he’d lost count. He could start a fight, right here, but that would only result in pushing Vergil away, and Dante doesn’t want that one bit.

It’s not worth arguing about. At least, not right now, when he is in his brother’s arms and Vergil’s eyes are unguarded in a way they rarely ever are.

“Promise me you’ll never leave me again.” The demand comes out quiet and strained.

“I promise,” whispers Vergil, and presses a slow kiss to his brother’s taut, conflicted lips. “I promise, I promise.” He feels himself rise to the occasion, blooming wide inside his brother as his blood rises indecently.

Dante’s blood resonates in response, sending tendrils of heat that ignite within him as his brother fills him once more. He whimpers, a soft sound that fades into Vergil’s mouth, as his arms wind around his brother tightly, holding him close.

He wants nothing more than to believe in the promise, to believe his brother when he says he’ll never leave him. That he’ll stay forever, here in Dante’s arms. That Dante will never again wake up alone.

He wants to hold onto it, the way he holds onto Vergil—with a kind of desperate intensity that never wants to let go.

Dante winds his fingers into his brother’s hair, deepening the kiss.

Vergil responds with cool and sudden passion, falling into the rhythm without hesitation. When he starts to move inside his brother, it’s an impulse and an afterthought, one that swiftly grows into an all-consuming pursuit. They’ve always been able to do this, and have never questioned it. Their inhuman anatomy knows no limitation but that of desire, and neither of them has ever lacked for that, especially where the other is concerned.

Vergil bows his head, feeling Dante’s briefly forsaken lips find new expressions at once, dusting his brow, his cheek, his nose; mindlessly hungry, beautifully clumsy with lust. He is moving in the slip of his own issue, embraced by his brother on all sides, blood stirring and thrumming and circling throughout their twinned forms as he rides Dante low and close.

After a moment he gives a rough groan and grasps Dante, reversing their positions and pulling him astride. His brother responds, reads his intentions before he even completes them and physically agrees, allowing himself to be moved. This is the flawless give-and-take of their bond. Dante’s weight settles hard around his cock and he groans again, letting his hands splay over his brother’s taut torso, easing upward with slow and worshipful force.

The temple of Dante’s body shudders.

He groans as he rocks with the deep, steady undulations, bending his head down to kiss Vergil, gasping into his mouth as his hips roll fluidly, the slide of their bodies made obscenely hot and lubricious by the product of their previous passion. It seeps down the length of Vergil’s cock, smearing along Dante’s thighs, and runs over the crests of Vergil’s hips—abundant and wet. Dante’s own issue is viscous and slick between their chests—a gloriously sinful mess that he tastes on his brother’s skin as his lips travel over Vergil’s chin and down the side of his neck.

Vergil arches into his brother’s motions, letting himself be ridden rough by his urban cowboy of a brother, watching low-lidded and appreciative as Dante tosses his silver mane, sweat-slicked ends catching on the broad domes of his shoulders. When his brother leans back in to run his mouth along his jaw Vergil shudders and feels his lips part. “Dante.”

Dante moans wantonly in response, his blood surging with potent desire for his brother as his teeth graze over Vergil’s skin.

The sound of his name in Vergil’s mouth is unlike anything else in the world; it rises within him like a prayer, an invocation of love. He revels in it as he finds his way back to his brother’s mouth, kissing him slow and hard, like the way his brother’s cock fills him with each deep roll of his hips. “Vergil,” he moans into the kiss, his fingers tangling in his brother’s hair. “ _Vergil_.”

Vergil grasps Dante’s jaw in his fingers, directing his gaze deep into his brother’s lust-stunned eyes. “Do you want to be inside me?” he asks, the words dark and low, rolling forth like dusk from his lips.

Dante trembles in the aftermath, poised on the edge of his brother’s sword. He slowly settles down with a low groan, his heart hammering in his chest as he looks into Vergil’s eyes and sees the need written there. It’s a quiet need, one that so rarely speaks itself out loud; one that waits patiently beneath the surface.

He finds himself wanting nothing more than to serve at his brother’s pleasure; to be the instrument of fulfillment, to give Vergil what he needs.

The thought of it makes him unbearably hard, and Dante’s cock pulses with desire.

“Yeah,” he breathes out quietly, turning his face to press a soft kiss into his brother’s palm. “I’d love that.”

Vergil smiles. He knows it’s not his brother’s natural desire, to take that role, but he also knows his brother’s natural desire is to see him pleased. “Excellent,” murmurs Vergil, cupping Dante’s hard jaw, feeling the invisible grit of his stubble, even as he feels the quiet pulse of his brother’s stilled body around him. “It seems...appropriate...that both of our names should be signed...to this promise. In something more precious than blood.”

Blood, after all, is cheap to them; they spill it without thinking. “I want you to splash the walls,” he whispers, to Dante. “And sign your art.”

This is more than just a request; it’s a benediction.

Dante feels the gravity of it—the depth of his brother’s sincerity. Vergil doesn’t just want to claim him like he always has. He wants to give himself fully to Dante, in a way he has never truly done before. Dante has never felt like Vergil completely belonged to him; his brother always seemed to belong to something greater than their love—something that always seemed to take Vergil from Dante’s arms.

But in this moment, his brother only wants to commit himself to his promise; he wants Dante to consecrate him. And though it certainly isn’t as though Dante hasn’t made love to him before, for the first time, he feels as though Vergil might finally belong to him, the way he always has belonged to his brother.

_“Look at me, Dante. All that I am. And know it’s yours alone.”_

Dante closes his eyes for a moment as he steadies himself. He finally understands what Vergil truly meant: that he belongs only to Dante, and nothing else. That Dante can finally claim ownership of him in a way he never was able to before. That he is offering himself up wholy for the taking—and all Dante has to do is claim him.

Dante looks down at his brother with a heart filled with love, and takes Vergil’s face in his hands and kisses him, hard and intense and bruising. He groans as he raises his body off his brother, a shiver breaking down his spine as Vergil’s cock slips out of him.

His body aches with the loss, clenching around emptiness.

Vergil’s seed drips out of him, hot and viscous.

Dante breaks the kiss to gaze upon his brother once more. “I want to make love to you with my tongue first,” he whispers, as his thumb brushes reverently over Vergil’s cheek.

“Do as you must, brother,” Vergil intones indulgently, turning his head, letting Dante’s thumb slip into his mouth, briefly, caressing it with his lips as he releases it. Dante’s pupils dilate in response, his breath quickening audibly. “My body is yours. Do what moves you.”

He feels the loss of Dante’s slick and heated grip around his cock, a certain ache at the absence, but is certain it will shortly be assuaged once more. Dante is nothing if not devoted in his full-hearted pursuit of indecency. “Shall I turn?”

“Yeah,” Dante agrees, and straightens up, fingers skimming over Vergil’s neck and down his slick chest as he slides off of him. His brother elegantly pushes himself up and turns, and Dante’s breath catches in his throat as he watches in appreciation, gaze sweeping over Vergil’s strong form as he settles down on his hands and knees before him.

His brother’s body has always been beautiful, carved like a marble statue; but his new body exudes more power and grace than it ever has before—a god made flesh. Vergil is the only religion Dante has ever known, and he worships him with awed eyes as his hand slides down the length of his brother’s spine in a slow, tender brush of appreciation from his nape, sliding towards his sacroiliac.

Vergil breathes out, arching under Dante’s fingertips as they stroke down his body, leaving tiny fires in their wake. He feels both powerful and exposed, naked like this before his brother—it is half surrender and half waiting to be served. Dante’s gaze is unrelenting, as if he is a priceless artifact. “Do you like what you see?” he asks, in a voice like silk and ashes.

“I love what I see,” Dante murmurs, an echo from a lifetime ago. “And I see what I love.”

Vergil gives an appreciative groan. He remembers those words, remembers speaking them. To have them given back to him is a strange, rare gift he had never expected. “You remember,” he murmurs. “Even after all these years.”

“I never could forget,” Dante says quietly, as he settles on his knees behind his brother, his other hand finding traction on his hip as he draws close.

He never imagined he would one day be able to say those sacred words out loud; words he enshrined and held inside of him, words he’s kept alive in his memories, revisiting them from time to time so that he would never forget how they sounded in his brother’s mouth.

Remembering was how he paid tribute to the undying love he held for his brother. He would lie awake at night, alone in his bed, and remember the way it felt; how Vergil’s voice sounded when he spoke those rarefied words of love. What it was like to be held by him.

He would stroke himself off, thinking of his brother’s smile, the taste of him in his mouth.

Every time he came, it was always brutal, and the pleasure was as unbearable as his grief.

Dante no longer needs to rely on his memories; he certainly isn’t alone anymore. He wants to make new memories with his brother, memories that are beautiful and bright, unmarred by the loss that had come to define them.

His hands slide over the muscular hemispheres of Vergil’s ass, grasping and squeezing with appreciation as he bends his head down and presses a soft, tender kiss of adoration to his brother’s spine.

The anticipation is part of the charm of this particular trick, Vergil knows. He feels it heightening his senses, honing them toward the next moment. The rain pounds down outside and his heart pounds with it, slow and steady, the beats increasing the longer Dante draws out his adoring ritual. He shudders, letting it carry through the whole line of his body, artfully, letting his brother know his admiring eyes and indecent intentions are appreciated.

Dante has always loved seeing him lose control; has always loved breaking through his brother’s perfect guard. Vergil has always held the pieces of himself together with a tight fist, so rarely coming apart the way Dante always does for him.

There’s something so gratifying about the way Vergil trembles for him, and Dante wants nothing more than to be the earthquake that shakes apart his brother.

His tongue sears a burning trail down his brother’s spine, and his fingers grip the firm globes of Vergil’s ass, parting them as he journeys south.

His brother’s dark scent is overwhelming here, and Dante groans as he plunges his nose into into the pungent crevice, breathing in the raw, humid scent of his brother as his mouth waters for him. “Fuck, Verge, you smell so good,” Dante murmurs. And then he plunges down, his tongue lapping over cryptic flesh, teasing it open with a low, hungry moan.

Vergil lets out a groan, rough and sudden, at the first flicker of Dante’s tongue. He had forgotten, somehow, over those long years apart, what power lay in the ritual of this beautiful obscenity— and nobody performs an indecent act with more unbridled enthusiasm than his swaggering wanton of a brother. “Fuck, I’ve missed you.”

Dante hums enthusiastically in response, groaning as his brother’s wonderful, ribald taste fills his mouth.

He can hardly believe that he’s able to do this now—that he’s allowed to feast upon Vergil and dine at his altar and devour him.

His eager tongue slicks round and round, chasing over delicate ridges and grooves that bloom open with the pressure of his ravenous tongue. He is insatiable in his licentious desire to please his brother, and expresses his gratitude in being allowed to serve him in such an intimate manner with loud, hungry moans.

Vergil quakes violently, bracing his arms into the bed, body taut and trembling. Dante’s relentless tongue sends full-body shivers through him, and he remembers again the vigor of his little brother’s lust—how unselfconscious and eager it is, how utterly artless and consuming. He finds himself rocking back into the sensation, giving himself over to it, and his brother takes what he offers with a violent ferocity.

Dante dips his thumbs into the dark, slick furrow and spreads his brother open obscenely, his tongue chasing over silky flesh, plunging and curling in. He loves the way Vergil slowly rides his tongue, the way he surrenders himself to it, how he lets it shatter him until he shakes. He loves the way his brother sounds—the harsh breaths that leave his nose, the moans he still holds in his mouth, clenched behind the jail of his teeth.

Dante loves everything there is to love about his brother, but what he loves most is when Vergil lets go.

He wants to hear it—the moment when Vergil finally loses control, when his moans leave him unbridled and wanton, when he lets himself live in the moment.

“Dante,” Vergil manages to say, in a rough whisper. “I need you, now. I need you inside me.”

Dante groans as his brother shakes with a violent paroxysm which trembles through his entire frame and into Dante. He shudders with it, delighting in it, his cock throbbing with a hot, wet pulse. For a second, he almost considers stopping, so that he can turn Vergil around and give him what he needs.

It’s staggering, realizing the depth of Vergil’s need—grasping how much power he truly has over his brother, who had spent his whole life chasing it. But Vergil has finally chosen him; has finally decided to surrender himself to the love Dante has always offered.

And in this moment, Dante wants nothing more than to claim him, entirely.

But not until he feels Vergil come apart a little more beneath his mouth.

Instead of pulling back, like he knows Vergil expects, Dante spreads him wider instead and ravenously plunges his tongue into his brother, making love to him voraciously. He wants to claim him, every part of him, and rip the last shred of control right out of his brother’s trembling hand.

“God dammit,” hisses Vergil. It’s maddening, this twilight sensation—too much and yet nowhere near enough. Dante seems to be feeling his powers, which he can’t begrudge, but the ache deep inside him grows, yawning like a cavern. He breathes out, gathering himself. “Little brother,” he says softly. “Have mercy.”

Triumph flares hot and bright inside of Dante.

Vergil never begs. This is as close to begging as Dante will ever get from his brother—a plea wrapped up in the form of a command. A demand. An imperative request.

He would sooner throw Dante off of him and take what belongs to him before resorting to truly begging for what he truly desires.

His brother is at the very edge of his limit—Dante can feel the way Vergil shudders beneath his ministrations, the tension wound wire-tight in his body, the threat of violence sitting just under his skin.

Dante knows he has to tread carefully—the wrong taunt might just lead to him on his back with his brother looming above him as he brutally claims his desire. And while Dante certainly would welcome such a thing, he knows it’s not what Vergil truly needs.

But if there’s one thing Dante’s good at, it’s taking unbelievably stupid risks.

He breaks his indecent, open-mouthed kiss and breathes out slowly against wet skin, then pulls back just enough to say, “Sorry, Verge, you taste too damn good. You wouldn’t want to rush my meal, now, would ya?”

He punctuates the question with a slow, torturous slick of tongue over quivering, raw flesh.

Vergil grimaces. It’s not his favorite analogy, but he knows Dante tends toward crudeness in his vigor. He shudders beneath the insolent lash of his brother’s tongue, nearly regretting his decision to allow this, to offer himself up in such a vulnerable way. Dante has never been careful with anything, especially not the things that are Vergil’s.

But he is disinclined to reverse their fortunes, in the moment. Dante’s straightforward engagement style means he only expects direct opposition. In this way, he has always been easy to blindside—purely by varying one’s tactics and confounding his expectations.

“How thoughtless of me, brother,” he murmurs, dropping to his forearms and widening his stance. “Allow me to assist you in your repast.”

Vergil closes his eyes and submits to his own will, embracing the torturous sensations. He has withstood worse. “I’ve waited twenty-four years for this, after all. I believe I can wait a little longer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, we know we're evil for ending the chapter right here, but if we didn't, the chapter would've been waaaaay too long. So, this was the best spot to split it up! xD 
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	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _But let me tell you, I'm ready to fly  
>  I survived through rainstorms, sandstorms  
> I fought the war, now it's time to go home_   
>  [Journey (Ready to Fly) - Natasha](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obKb7-6MtLs)
> 
>  
> 
>  **NOTE:** There are two pieces of very NSFW 18+ art embedded in this chapter. Use discretion when reading!

The blow lands swiftly, cuts deep.

Dante’s stricken by it for a moment, as every muscle in his body freezes.

He should’ve known better than to provoke his brother, especially when Vergil had allowed himself to be vulnerable—something he has never been very good at, let alone comfortable with. In toeing the line of his brother’s limits, Dante had somehow unwittingly crossed it—and Vergil responded the way he always does when he feels like he might be defeated—brutally, without any forgiveness.

Some part of Dante wonders if maybe he’d read this whole thing wrong.

Maybe Vergil doesn’t really want to surrender, after all.

Maybe he just wanted Dante to serve at his pleasure as he always had in the past, without ever truly being able to claim ownership of it.

Dante suddenly feels foolish.

Of course, Vergil wouldn’t want to relinquish the last shred of power he still holds in his hand.

After all, Dante is the reason he had to wait twenty-four years to begin with.

Dante takes a shaky, quiet breath and closes his eyes. “On second thought… you’re right.” His voice is a shadow of what it was a moment earlier. He lightly gives his brother’s hip a squeeze and then withdraws completely, sitting back on his heels. “Turn around.”

Vergil rises to his hands and knees once more. “I’ve changed my mind,” he says, quietly.

He can feel Dante’s crestfallen dismay, a subtle wave of mood that laps at the edges of his mind and makes him wince. He is both regretful and resentful, bitter at them both—Dante, for giving him no quarter when granted power over him in his newly fragile state; for greedily pushing the limits, as Dante always does, for playing with his emotions when no other man has ever been inside him, and Vergil’s been an ascetic for twenty-four years—and himself, for reacting at once with such Machiavellian habit, coolly and viciously scorching the earth rather than humbling himself before his brother, rather than granting him the smug satisfaction. Would it kill him, he wonders, to simply let Dante conquer him once in a while? But is Dante even capable of understanding the depths of such a concession? His brother has never understood him.

“It’s best we don’t. Perhaps the time isn’t right.”

Perhaps it will never be right. He feels hollow inside, as the ache turns to ash.

Vergil turns, unable to fully meet Dante’s eyes, glancing off their lightly wounded surface, though he offers a faint smile. He touches his brother’s thigh, the way that was done to him, and settles back on the bed.

Dante nods slowly, trying not to lose his shit completely, his eyes trained on the sheet.

He'd clearly fucked up—pushed too hard, taken a risk he shouldn't have taken, and now here they are. He should've known better than to play with the fragility of what his brother had offered; should've held him more tenderly, should've simply followed Vergil's lead, instead of trying to carve out his own path. He should've done a lot of things differently, because now Vergil has his walls up again like he needs to Royal Guard against his younger brother. As though Dante actually had wanted to hurt him, when all he really wanted was to make love to him. To make him feel good. To serve at his pleasure.

But now he doesn't even get the right to do that.

He probably never actually had the right to begin with.

Vergil was just giving him a mercy he hadn't earned.

He should've known better.

He should've known.

Instead, he hurt his brother, when Vergil was trusting him with the most vulnerable part of himself.

It’s unforgivable.

“Fuck, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” Dante's breath clenches in his throat and the whole world blurs as everything within him shatters and he's moving before he's really even thinking about what he's doing, a mad scramble off the bed.

It’s a shockingly human moment. So human, so awkward and pained it makes Vergil uncomfortable with its sudden assault, its poignancy thrust upon him. Dante doesn’t even use his powers, like he’s forgotten he has them. He just stumbles toward the door, hastily, naked—too beautiful to be truly human, too devastated to be truly demonic.

Vergil does not forget his, and his reaction is instinctive. He teleports between his brother and the door, blocking it with his body. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asks.

Dante hadn’t been thinking at all—too caught up in the brutal tide of emotion that had suddenly inundated him, overwhelming him completely.

His sole focus had been removing himself from potentially fucking up even more, putting distance between himself and his brother, whose presence he doesn’t deserve to bask in. Whose love he can’t wrap himself up in. Whose body he can’t desecrate with himself, when he’d already defiled the holy sacrament his brother had offered to him.

He stops in his tracks and takes a backwards step, trapped between the bed and the door.

There’s a storm raging in his eyes, but it’s nothing compared to the one in his chest, which has him unmoored in a wild, dark sea of regret so deep, it’s impossible to plumb its depths.

Dante trembles where he stands, staring through hot, bitter tears at his brother, who feels like he’s bracing for war.

Getting around Vergil is impossible—not without a fight.

“I dunno, wasn’t really thinking,” he admits, and immediately regrets opening his mouth, because now that he has, a sob comes rolling out, and his hand slaps across his mouth, as though that would somehow push it back in. His shoulders shake as his eyes squeeze shut and he drops his face into the shield of his hand, staggering back with another step.

“No,” says Vergil. “We’re not doing this. No one’s leaving anyone.”

He moves forward, into his brother’s personal space, mercilessly invading his territorial bubble. “That was part of the promise, wasn’t it.”

He grasps the back of Dante’s neck with both hands, seeking his gaze, but Dante refuses to look at him, hiding from him behind his hand. His body is tense and trembling, pulled taut like a bowstring. “Don’t break down on me, brother,” he murmurs. “Speak with me.” His thumbs caress the skin, slowly, massaging it. “Dante.”

Vergil’s hands are an anchor Dante doesn’t think he deserves.

He shudders beneath his brother’s hold, his body instinctively responding, even in the midst of devastation. The brutal impact of his emotions slam against the solid ground quickly forming between his feet, stopping what had seemed like an inevitable descent into the abyss yawning wide inside of him.

Vergil’s thumb strokes along the back of Dante’s neck, and he exhales a ragged breath, trying and failing to reconcile his overwhelming desire to step into his brother’s arms with the feeling that he shouldn’t touch him at all.

Shit. He doesn’t know why he can’t get a grip on himself before Vergil. Why it’s so easy for him to come apart beneath the cold weight of his gaze. Why he can’t simply force himself back underneath a cavalier veneer of irreverence, burying the storm before it even had a chance to gather.

He hates this—feeling so fucking powerless, unable to get himself under control, when he’d spent a lifetime mastering his emotions behind an empty smile and a throwaway line.

But Vergil always did know all the best ways to smash through his guard.

Vergil is silent for a long moment, and when it becomes apparent Dante has no words, he nods. “Very well,” he says. “Then listen.”

He seeks his brother’s eyes again, chasing his elusive gaze. All the while his hands maintain their vigil. “I’m sorry,” he says, and lets the foreign words stand, alone, for some time. Dante is so stunned that he finally looks up at him, his eyes red-rimmed and wet, his hand slowly descending from his face. “We both know I’m far from perfect—as a brother, or a lover. I withdraw when I feel my gentilesse is abused. I can be cold. And I can be cruel. For years I’ve trusted no one, especially not you.”

He draws closer, so that their skin is nearly skimming. “I’m trying, I swear to you. But I’m a work in progress, and it hasn’t even been a day. Take pity on me, Dante. Forgive me, if you can.”

“Why the hell are you apologizing?” Dante finally asks when he finds his voice, and it comes out broken and raw. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for. You’re not the one who fucked up.”

If anything, Vergil’s reaction and subsequent withdrawal was well-deserved—Dante had violated his tenuous trust. Had turned what should have been a sacred act into a farce on a foolish whim.

“ _I’m_ the one who should be begging for your forgiveness, Vergil, not the other way around.”

“No,” says Vergil, firmly. “You were only trying to love me, with everything you have. You’d think I’d learned nothing from all of this. But it overwhelms me, sometimes—to be here, to be alive. To be with you again. I hold myself apart because I fear being at your mercy. And I don’t trust you to be merciful.” He pauses. “But such things must begin somewhere.”

He leans in all at once, and kisses Dante’s lips, holding his head.

“I beg, and I surrender,” he whispers. “Please, brother.”

Dante reels in confusion and shock, his breath stuttering against his brother’s mouth.

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with a confession like this, with a sincere plea that he is no longer worthy of, and hasn’t earned. He doesn’t even know if he can touch Vergil right now, let alone claim his surrender, or any part of him at all.

He certainly doesn’t feel like he has the right anymore.

“I don’t deserve this,” he whispers after a moment, in disbelief.

“I’m the one who decides what you deserve,” intones Vergil, low in his throat. He whirls them around, backing toward the bed with slow, inexorable steps, drawing Dante with him. It almost feels like a waltz. He feels the bed hit the back of his knees a beat later, and pulls Dante close against him, so they’re skin to skin, chests and cocks touching. “Don’t give in yet,” he murmurs. “Make me ask you twice.”

“Vergil…” Dante breathes out softly, his expression conflicted and uncertain, as he gingerly raises his hand to touch his brother, hesitating before his fingers reach Vergil’s hip. His hand hovers and then drops back down as his brows draw together in a flinch.

He doesn’t know if he can do this, but Vergil wants him, needs him, and Dante doesn’t want to tell him that he doesn’t know how to even touch him right now.

Vergil captures his brother’s hand, and brings it to his body, reinforcing it with his own. “You have every permission to trespass here.”

He is filled with regret at the loss of the previous joy that had lit Dante’s gaze, the utter abandon and earnest desire. Now he seems wounded, gun-shy—a variation on the man who’d been unable to look him in the eye, who’d told him to take the bed while clutching a bottle of whiskey. “You always have. And you always will.”

Dante still doesn’t look completely reassured, his apprehension held tightly in the tension that runs through his shoulders and down the entire length of his spine.

Vergil reaches down to grasp his own cock, along with Dante’s, holding them flush against each other for a moment, before slowly easing his fist over their twinned length. His brother inhales sharply at the sensation, his lashes reflexively dropping to half-mast. “How does that feel? Did you miss it? Me against you?”

Dante shudders as Vergil’s fingers tighten. His brother is rock hard. Dante can feel Vergil’s arousal thrumming along the entire length of his cock. It resonates deep within him, stirring his blood, sending a sharp pulse through his body, all the way to the tip. Vergil’s fingers trail all the way up, dragging lightly over the head of his cock, and that’s all the spark Dante needs for the embers inside him to ignite.

He slowly swells in his brother’s hand.

“Yeah,” Dante murmurs, his breath quickening, along with his pulse, as his cock grows harder. “I missed you.”

It’s been a lifetime since he’s been pressed like this against his brother.

The urge to touch him, to draw closer, overwhelms the hesitation sitting at the pit of his stomach. Dante gives into it finally, as his hand slides out from under Vergil’s to carefully, delicately travel up the length of his chest. Touching him cautiously, as though his brother might break beneath his fingers.

His breath catches slightly as Vergil strokes back down, carrying a tendril of molten heat in his touch.

Vergil always did know how to play him as precisely as he wields his sword.

“Feels good,” he confirms in a near pant, as his cock fills out completely, throbbing beneath his brother’s skilled fingers.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Vergil is breathless now. “I always liked this. There’s nothing quite like it.” Dante is stiff against him now, flared and flushed with blood, and he relishes the satin drag of their foreskins, the hard friction of their well-matched weapons. “Simple. Elegant. The measure of you, and the measure of me. Together.”

He throws an arm around his brother and pulls them close, intimate, angling his head to kiss Dante’s throat as he strokes their cocks with a firm swordsman’s grip. “Does it please you as it does me, brother?”

Dante groans softly in affirmation as Vergil’s mouth brushes over his roaring pulse, his brother’s breath hot and humid against his skin. Desire surges within him with every stroke of Vergil’s hand; and as the glide grows smoother, slicker with the glossy emanations of their shared lust, he finds himself slowly losing his reservations.

His fingers slide up to Vergil’s shoulder, his other hand curling around his brother’s hip, and he leans into Vergil, slowly undulating with each delicious stroke.

Dante’s breath is ragged with growing pleasure as the tension that had lined his frame melts from him completely. He finds himself wanting to kiss his brother, and gives himself over to it, his chin dropping down as his hand winds all the way up into Vergil’s hair to gently clench in soft, silver strands, tugging his brother’s head back.

The kiss is soft, measured.

Dante still doesn’t feel like he really deserves this, but he wants it— _needs_ it, as much as Vergil needs him.

Vergil parts his lips and falls headlong into the kiss, the contours of his body softening as he lets himself melt against his brother, feeling every inch of his skin. “This,” he whispers as he gives his brother’s cock a slow, deliberate squeeze, “is mine. As mine is yours.”

His brother moans softly in acquiescence, a quiet whine at the back of his throat.

He steers them in a slow half-circle, then pushes Dante back onto the bed. His brother easily goes with the motion without resistance, falling back gracelessly onto the sheets, legs parted, cock hard and wanting, jutted up. He looks down the length of his body, eyes locking onto Vergil, lips slightly parted with breathless want.

“You are beautiful, brother.” Vergil follows him down, crawling over Dante’s body in a leisurely, sinuous way. “A vision. Make no mistake.”

He has seen Dante fall back beneath a hundred blows and blasts, including his own, and Urizen’s—take punishment no mortal man could, and come up smiling. He’s not smiling now, but he doesn’t look unhappy, either. The darkness that had filled his eyes earlier seems to have receded, replaced with a look that is quiet and unguarded, filled with tender longing.

Vergil straddles him smoothly, strong thighs sliding astride his brother’s lean, powerful loins. He raises slightly and reaches beneath, grasping Dante’s iron length, angling it to align with his entrance. He pauses, his brother’s cock poised to enter him, anticipation pulsing, letting the head brush the furrowed crepe. “Will you grant me this, Dante?” he intones.

Dante trembles as he looks up at his older brother, his hands slowly moving to brush up Vergil’s powerful thighs. It would be easy, effortless, to grasp Vergil by the hips and impale his brother on his cock, like he had done countless times in their youth—tearing into him with reckless abandon, reveling in the violence, the brutality of it all.

Vergil would grit his teeth, and his eyes would go dark and sharp, like they do in the heat of battle; his body a glorious marvel to behold, quaking in his effort to retain control. They would fuck like they fought—tearing at each other relentlessly.

But they are no longer at war, and this isn’t a battlefield.

“It’s already yours, Vergil,” he utters softly. “But let’s do this right.”

Dante reaches out blindly, without taking his eyes off Vergil, managing to snag the bottle on his bedside table. “What is that thing you always say?” he asks as he pumps out a generous amount of the viscous substance onto his palm. “ _Good things come to those who wait._ ”

He removes his brother’s hand from his cock, taking control of it to slide it out of the way as he reaches between Vergil’s legs, his slick fingers gently brushing over cryptic flesh. His eyes remain trained on his brother’s face, watching intently as the pads of his fingertips encircle the tight furrow, before he slowly slides one in.

“Ah.” Vergil’s inhalation is audible in the stillness, thighs taut and back arching as he feels Dante’s finger slip up inside him, all the way to the knuckle. He should not have doubted. His body remembers at once; these maneuvers are well-engrained in their past, habitual and instinctive as swordplay. He reaches down to brace his hand against the hard wall of Dante’s stomach and groans again, as his brother’s fingertip glances the deep secret inside him, obliquely—the one Vergil knows his brother’s broad cock will bullseye without mercy.

This is the softest, most sacred part of Vergil—the only part of him Dante has ever known that has the power to make his tight seams unravel, that can truly bring his brother to his knees in a way nothing else can.

That he’s allowed to do this at all, that he’s permitted trespass upon hallowed ground, is a privilege Dante won’t foolishly squander a second time.

He knows just how careful he must be in this tender act of redemption.

Dante has always been cut out of rough cloth and formed with blunt edges, and usually speaks in a language of brute force and violence. But, in this act, he is focused and precise. He slowly strokes over the beautiful vulnerability within his brother, curling his finger with each pass as he eases Vergil open. He takes his time, working him apart gently, before pressing in a second digit.

“God yes,” utters Vergil on a hiss and a held breath, rocking forward slightly, his whole being balanced on the head of a pin—compelled by the slow and steady motion, sensual and leisured, so unlike his brother’s legend and yet so like his love: an endless, inexhaustible force that wears Vergil down like water on a stone.

He feels himself open for Dante, muscles quivering and easing, embracing his brother’s questing fingers as they fill him, flirting with the space beyond. His cock aches and seeps, hot with blood and brutally stiff, jutting north so forcefully it’s nearly grazing his stomach. The glans kisses the muscles there with touches of crystalline liquid.

Vergil lets his head fall back, feeling his body respond, gently riding his brother’s touch.

Dante is breathless as he watches his brother, love washing over him endlessly, gratitude lighting him up from within. He is profoundly grateful that he’s been given this precious second chance; grateful for being allowed to worship again; grateful that he can bear witness to the most beautiful thing in the universe—his brother, his lover, his god.

“God, you’re beautiful,” Dante whispers roughly as he surges up and claims his brother’s gasping mouth. His arm winds around Vergil’s waist as his fingers plunge and curl and stroke with divine purpose, his hunger for his brother making itself known once more as he slicks his tongue into Vergil’s mouth.

His own arousal presses hard against his brother’s ass, desire leaking copiously from the tip and smearing over his skin. It’s an exquisite agony, drawing this out, exercising infinite patience, which has never come naturally to him.

He kisses Vergil voraciously, sucking on his tongue, nipping at his lip, as he fucks his brother open slowly with each gentle press of his fingers.

“I need more,” intones Vergil on a harsh, feathery breath, vaguely realizing too late that he should probably never use those words again, given their logical past conclusions, but Dante doesn’t blench, doesn’t react except to kiss him harder, hold him harder, love him harder.

He can feel Dante’s cock against him, slick with effluvient and menacingly blunt. He aches for its intrusion. As a shard to a stone, as Yamato could both breach and seal; rend and make whole.

Vergil closes his eyes and presses their faces together, cool brow to fevered cheekbone. “Come into me, my brother, my love. Displace all the darkness inside me.”

Dante’s fingers still within his brother, as his breath shudders in his throat. He tilts his chin forward and gently kisses his brother, achingly tender. And then, he quietly utters two words he’s never said sincerely in his entire life: “Yes, Vergil.”

Vergil exhales audibly at the words. “Thank you,” he whispers coarsely, staying close, hiding his eyes.

Dante softly kisses him again, as his fingers slide out of his brother and he reaches for the bottle, warming up the lubrication between his fingers before he generously slicks his cock. He hisses between his teeth slightly at the sensation, stroking from tip to base and back up again. It’s torturous. Dante’s nearly panting as he guides the blunt, wet head of his cock to his brother’s entrance, notching it in place, a tremble quaking through the length of him.

His eyes meet his brother’s and his heart thunders in his chest.

“Here we go,” he whispers, and lets his hands slide down to grasp the hemispheres of his brother’s ass, spreading them before he slowly starts to press up into Vergil, moaning softly as the head of his cock breaches into exquisite, tight heat.

If Vergil could laugh, he would. _Here we go._ It’s such a Dante thing to say, and he is struck with an absurd bolt of love for his ridiculous, indomitable brother and his dauntless, shrugged-off savoir faire. But the thrust of the glans past the barrier steals his breath and leaves him mindless, caught in the maelstrom of pure sensation.

Vergil’s whole body goes rigid, every muscle flexing, back arching like a strung bow, as if the slow, spreading incursion of his brother’s stiff cock has transmuted him, transmitting its rigor. “Ah,” he rips out, brusque and guttural, like a battle cry. His hands seek the cut lines of Dante’s hips, the swells of hard muscle that carve and cradle his Adonis apron, dramatically forming the vee of his loins. It has always been alluring, mesmerizing to Vergil.

Dante trembles violently under his touch, hardly able to believe that this is really happening.

After all these years, all this time, Vergil’s finally in his arms once more. He’s finally opening up, letting Dante in, surrendering to his love.

Allowing Dante to make him whole.

Dante’s gasps are frantic and pleasure-shocked, as he plunges into everything that is his brother, groaning loudly as his cock sinks deeper and deeper, slowly burying himself all the way to the hilt.

His brother is unbelievably tight. Just being inside of him like this is almost enough to make Dante lose it, right there. He doesn’t know how he’s going to last at all, when Vergil grips him and draws him in, holding him like it’s where he’s always belonged.

By the time he’s fully seated inside his brother, he’s panting raggedly against the curve of Vergil’s throat, nearly mad with desire for him.

Vergil breathes slowly, in and out, overcome. Dante’s thick cock settles deep, parting his still waters, and his body responds like a heavy sea, engulfing him under the rippling weight of its waves. It’s even more intense than he remembers—the pulse of his brother’s life inside him, the pleasure of his size pushing outward, straining the walls of his temple.

He grips the back of Dante’s head, crushing soft, silvery hair beneath passionate fingers. “I was nearly undone, just then,” he whispers. “Brother.”

Dante groans softly at the thought. He drags his lips up the line of Vergil’s throat and gives his ass an appreciative squeeze, as his mouth finds his brother’s. He kisses him deeply, humming with deep satisfaction against Vergil’s mouth, tongue lapping across the tiers of his lips. “Woulda been pretty hot if that was all it took,” he murmurs between kisses. “Guess I’ll just have to work that much harder for ya.”

Vergil shudders. “I fear it won’t take much.” He’s unbearably aroused, impaled by his brother’s most powerful sword, locked in his broad arms like Dante intends to never let go. Vergil moves his hips, rolling them slowly, and the sudden, near-violent bloom of pleasure makes him reel. Dante’s blunt weapon has a slight curve, and it hits him where he lives. It’s always been like this, for them, but the held-back years and longing have stoked this moment to a fever pitch. He moves again, with a low, ripped-out groan, shaking as he does.

Dante cries out as pleasure rips through him before he has a chance to brace himself against it, so sharp and intense, it almost pushes him right over the edge. He’s suddenly so close to coming, he doesn’t even know how he’s going to be able to properly move his hips, to give his brother what it is he needs.

And the thought of that—of coming before he’s even begun to serve his purpose—is enough for Dante to clench his teeth as he tries to claw back some kind of control over his cock.

His entire body trembles as he gasps for breath, and his hands grab his brother’s hips tightly, forcing them to still. He buries his face in the hot curve of Vergil’s neck, breathing in his scent. “Verge—” he groans softly, apologetically. “Just— give me a moment.”

He needs to adjust, to acclimate to the feeling of being engulfed in his brother.

“Perhaps you’re right,” gasps Vergil, closing his eyes, clasping Dante’s head to him. The pulse in his loins is excruciating, hovering on the absolute precipice of climax. It will take nearly nothing to tip him into ruin. “I’m dying for you, Dante.” He means it in the most poetic sense. “It’s too much, after so long.” He chuckles at the absurdity of it, and then immediately regrets it, as Dante groans at the sensation. “Quick. Think of something vile.”

Dante laughs, a low quiet thing in the back of his throat, breath puffing out against Vergil’s throat. “Y’know, brother, I’ve got a feeling that ain’t gonna work….” There’s nothing on this earth or below that could possibly extinguish the eternal flame inside him that burns for his brother, now that he’s plunged himself into Vergil’s depths. “You feel too damn good.”

It’s taking him longer than he would like to get ahold of himself. To regain control when he’s caught in a current that drags him out further from the shore, and he’s suddenly forgotten how to swim. He can feel the way Vergil’s fingers move through his hair, his brother’s breath hot against his scalp. Can taste the way Vergil’s heart races, just as fast as his own. He focuses on that—on the thunder of his brother’s pulse, which beats so hard he can feel it through his cock.

Their blood sings together, in pitch-perfect harmony.

For a little while, they remain clutched in each other’s arms, breathing in the same air, allowing the two halves of their souls to find equilibrium. It takes some time, but eventually, Dante is able to finally lift his head up again to look at his brother, who gazes back at him with eyes filled with a quiet fire that threatens to consume him.

It makes Dante shake on the inside.

Makes him shudder, as his cock throbs hard and steady inside of his brother.

He wants that fire, wants it licking across every surface of him. He could burn up like so much ash in the sky, and it wouldn’t matter, so long as Vergil is the one doing it.

He lets out a quiet, shaky breath.

“You ready, Verge?” he asks, even though he’s not sure if either of them can ever truly be.

“I can’t promise anything,” Vergil says, wryly, with a faint smile. “But I’m game.” There’s a strange, exhilarating playfulness to this interlude, in spite of the crashing, ancient, ageless passion that holds them fast in its unremitting grip—their childhood was never innocent, exactly, steeped as it was in petty fraternal strife and the growing erotic shadow of their uncommon bond, but this dynamic is something new, now that they’re both grown men; obscene and beautiful and irreverent and life-affirming.

It’s everything Dante has ever wished for; everything he’s dreamt of for the past twenty-four years—to be able to hold Vergil like this again, to see his smile light up the sky of Dante’s world.

He returns his brother’s smile with one of his own, a lazy, crooked thing that he presses against Vergil’s mouth in a soft kiss as his hands slowly traipse back down to find their place along the sculpted hemispheres of his brother’s perfect ass.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn ya,” Dante drawls as he inhales a bracing breath, and then slowly rolls his hips, groaning at the delicious friction as he thrusts up into his brother, high and deep, his fingers gripping hard as he spreads Vergil wide around his dick.

Vergil snarls as brutal sensation shoots through him, every cell and molecule alive and afire in a way he thinks they may never have been—even before the corruption, even before the fall. He laughs in harsh and mindless joy, in disbelief at the surreality of it all. Of all the endings in the world, he’d never imagined this one for the two of them, though he’d always secretly hoped, deep in the darkest part of him that he could never admit to. That they would spend the rest of their days lost in each other’s arms, each other’s bodies, seems too good to be true.

He can gaze into his brother’s eyes and see the seasons of suffering there, but they’re ever more faint, as bulletproof layers of love build up and linger. He wonders if Dante can feel the scars inside him, deep beneath his blightness and un-benighted skin, or if they’re fading even as they fuck, effaced by the deep, relentless rubbing of his brother’s massive cock, like a stylus on a palimpsest.

“God yes, brother,” he murmurs, eyes closed, lips parted, his mind white with pleasure. “Spill yourself upon my altar.”

It’s a command, an order, a prayer all at once, and Dante moans, eager to serve, eager to give himself over to his brother’s pleasure.

He angles his hips slightly, aligning their bodies in such a way that allows every hard inch of his cock to plow right into Vergil where he wants it the most, slow and hard and shuddering, as he presses his forehead against his brother’s and seeks out his eyes, falling into their depths the way he falls into his body. He drinks in the sight of Vergil, disheveled and hopelessly needy in a way he so rarely is—and all he wants to do is claim that need for himself, to claim his brother even though he’s not sure if he has the right.

He wants his brother to come apart in a way he never has before, to tear down every last wall between them until there’s nothing left but their love. He wants him more than he’s ever wanted anything in his life; wants to claim every part of him until there’s no part of Vergil that isn’t his. He wants _everything_ even if there’s a part of him that knows he’s not worthy. Even if there’s a whisper in the back of his mind telling him that it’s not what he deserves.

With a low, primal growl, Dante rises up on his knees, bearing Vergil’s weight entirely as he slides his cock out to the tip and then slams back in—a brutal grinding right into the very core of everything his brother is. He leaves the shadows of his fingers in Vergil’s skin as his mouth drops down to sear along his brother’s neck, leaving harsh red tracks in the wake of his teeth, moaning against hot skin.

Dante spears up into him, striking like nothing has ever struck him before, and Vergil throws his head back with a loud, clenched cry, strained through his teeth, strained through his very soul. His core convulses like the report of a gun—again and again—as he grips his brother’s furiously working body, the muscles fevered beneath his hands.

It’s white-hot immolation, immediate and staggering, and his cock erupts in a surge of liquid silk, spattering them both, hitting their chests like shrapnel. He grasps his brother’s face, shuddering, eyes crushed shut against the piquancy of feeling. “Don’t stop,” is all he can manage to gasp out, on the rough edge of a breath.

“ _Fuck_ —” Dante chokes out between gritted teeth as his brother’s orgasm slams through him like a tsunami, flooding him with sensation as Vergil’s body continues to violently spasm around his surging cock. The pleasure is so intense, so hot and wicked, that Dante finds himself dangerously close to coming, and easily could’ve followed his brother over the edge, had Vergil not commanded him to continue. His fingers claw deep into Vergil’s flesh, gripping him bruisingly as his teeth sink down into his shoulder and he rides the brutal wave, a keening whine trapped in his throat as he fights down the primal fever inside of him.

The echo of his brother's cry still rings in his ears—the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard. There’s a raw vulnerability there, like Vergil’s breathless demand for more. Something tender and aching, like all the secrets that lie beneath Vergil’s skin—all that was unspoken and lost between them, spilling out like the ink that he’d carried in the flesh of his humanity.

Dante wants to reach in and yank it to the surface—what it is that his brother holds deep within himself. Everything he’s always been too proud to share with his younger brother. Everything he’s always kept so carefully buried, beneath layers of glacial frost and unwavering control.

Dante wants Vergil to offer it up to him like he offers up his breath, which Dante swallows down with a kiss.

He shifts his grip on his brother, wrapping one arm behind his back, and carefully lays him down on the bed without breaking their connection. Like this, he can take his time; he can slow down and make love to his brother right.

Dante braces an arm on the bed as he hovers low and close to his brother, his other hand finding its way to Vergil’s face as he continues to rock within him—so slow it can’t really be called _fucking_ at all _._ Moans spill unabashedly out of his lips each time he plunges in, gasping in his service of pleasure.

Vergil gazes at Dante, lips parted, face unguarded, staring breathless and rapt into the foreign mirror of his brother’s eyes at this intimate range. His brother looks down at him, cupping his face like a priceless object, his heavy-lidded eyes full of quiet tumult, brimming with unreadable emotion. He feels Dante moving inside him, a slow and reverent vigil that tenderly stirs the ashes; pumping into him gently like a bellows, stoking and re-igniting the still-glowing embers of his desire.

And sure enough, Vergil feels himself rising, his cock surging into fresh life between the intricately carved columns of their stomachs, and he breathes out slowly, appreciating the micro-sensations of the moment, luxuriating in Dante’s weight and breadth and scent, and the senses-owning presence of his brother’s most sacred flesh, locked in his body’s deepest embrace.

His brother is breathtakingly dutiful and devoted to his cause, his dauntlessness never more powerful than when turned to the service of love. Vergil finds himself in awe of his brother’s steadfast majesty. “You’re magnificent,” he breathes, the words artless and unvarnished.

The roar of hunger raging inside of Dante is muted by his brother’s words of love, and he pauses inside of him with his heart thundering in his ears as he looks down at everything that he’s been waiting for his entire life. Vergil looks up at him with eyes that are awed and shining with open love, like Dante is the most beautiful creature he’s ever beheld—someone worthy of reverence; someone who deserves to kneel before him and bear witness to his glory; someone who has the right to serve him and sanctify him with unconditional love.

Vergil is never more beautiful than in these secret, holy moments when the truth of him is written across his face and burns in his eyes; when the layers of ice that make up his armor melt away to reveal the open tenderness beneath. When the coldness of him gives way to the fire that has always burned deep within, beyond the scarred expanse of their broken past; beyond the nightmares that had once lived within his skin; beyond the vastness of darkness that crouched in shadow, leaching away at his light until all that remained was the hopelessness of unending night. There, in the distance, in the quiet hidden forest, burns a single flame, one Dante recognizes if only because it has always burned, unhidden, within himself.

It’s the same fire that he’s carried with him since the moment his soul took form: his love for his brother, which knows no end.

It lights up Vergil’s eyes and reflects in the heat of Dante’s gaze, twin flames blazing across two ends of the universe to ignite in a single conflagration that burns hotter than the sun.

“You’re everything,” Dante whispers as his thumb traces over his brother’s cheek.

“Had to one-up me, huh?” Vergil says, but he’s wearing a soft smile. “Some things will never change.”

His hands ease over Dante’s ass, kneading soft flesh over hard muscle, feeling it for the fine art that it is. His brother lies heavy in the cradle of his legs, his weight delicious, his body sheltering. Vergil feels anchored in a way he’s never allowed before; pinned to the earth by the gravity of his brother’s love in every sense.

The longer he gazes into his brother’s eyes, the more he feels the growing ache—of his rock-hard cock, of Dante’s still presence inside him, pushing his boundaries in more ways than one. “If I’m everything,” he intones, husked and low, “then give me your all.”

“I’d never dream of giving you any less.”

It’s all Dante has ever known how to give—all of himself, the calculus of everything he is and has ever been. He surrenders himself to it, to the flood of emotion inside him, the love and the passion that illuminates even the darkest of nights. He lets it overtake him as he pours it into the way he kisses his brother, into the rhythm he begins to set once more with the slow, sensual roll of his hips, deep and hard all at once, bruising and tender and violently sweet.

“ _Vergil…_ ” He says his brother’s name like it’s a prayer, something to be worshiped, something to be held. It’s rife with devotion, with adoration, with need and desire and hope and everything Dante had always been too terrified to claim for himself, everything he finally dares to claim in this moment of mutual surrender.

He groans against his brother’s trembling lips, as he draws them closer to the edge, bringing them right up to the precipice of another cliff. He can feel it—how close they both are, shuddering in his bones, screaming through his blood, with the way their bodies quake together as one with every devastating thrust. He can hear it in the ecstatic, breathless moans and gasps shared between their mouths, as Dante drives deeper, faster, and dives deep into the surge of his brother’s unvarnished love.

This is more than just sex, more than just a reclamation of all they had lost. This is Dante deciding that he’s finally taking what should have always belonged to him from the start. He’d waited a lifetime for this moment, for the final wall between them to drop, for Vergil to finally surrender himself completely, to offer himself up for the claiming, and Dante is going to _take_ him, all of him—his body, his moans, his trembles, his dark-eyed vulnerability and the coldness he wraps around himself; the bitterness of his judgement and the violence of his despair; all the terrible, unspoken secrets that hide under his skin and the remnants of battles carved into his hands. He’ll take it all, without question, without hesitation, holding it in his arms as tenderly as Vergil might hold the jagged pieces of Dante in his palms, and whisper in his ear, you’re mine now. You belong to me as I belong to you, and I’ll never let you go.

He takes it all like he takes his brother’s breath with his tongue dripping into Vergil’s mouth, with a hand wrapped around his brother’s dripping cock, which he strokes hard and fast as he slams in deep and achingly slow, scarcely believing that he can finally call Vergil his own—Vergil, who is as holy as he is infernal, as powerful as he is vulnerable, so perfect and flawed and wonderful and terrible, Dante doesn’t even know how his brother could be real.

“Vergil…” It’s a warning, a plea, desperate in its entreaty, as Dante shakes violently, struggling to hold back his orgasm, not wanting to fall before his brother, to give in before he’s fulfilled his sacred purpose.

Vergil feels his brother’s strong body straining at its limits, struggling to hold on; feels the tremors chasing through it. Gazing into Dante’s face, he sees a powerful man overcome, beside himself with passion and desire, trembling before his altar and undone by love—his brother hides nothing from him. The raw honesty in his fevered blue eyes is more piercing than any weapon, and it penetrates Vergil to the depths of his soul, an intimacy that wounds him and steals his breath, more than any battle ever has.

It does not terrify Dante to be conquered by love; he welcomes this defeat. He serves a greater purpose.

Cupid’s crossbow bolt rips right through Vergil’s heart once again, violent and unsparing, as it did when they were children, as it did when they were nineteen; as it always will.

He can only submit to this man; subsume himself before such exquisite, magnificent devotion.

“Yes, Dante,” he breathes, at last, letting himself break.

Vergil clutches Dante in his arms, cleaves to him—crying out, long and low and shuddering, syllables drawn from his lips like a broken string of pearls. His climax is thunderous, bursting forth, surging from somewhere deep inside him, rolling through his loins with jagged and staggering force, battering him, and he convulses violently around his brother’s cock, body gripping it viciously. His own cock seizes, jerking out heavy white bolts of liquid heat, in rapid, ecstatic pulses, slicking the moving walls of their bodies as Dante bows his head and pounds him through his resolution with slow determination, gritting his teeth.

It shoots up between them, splattering all over Dante’s face—across his lips and chin and nose, thick and viscous and sinfully delicious, and that’s all it takes for Dante to fall with the wicked taste of his brother’s love in his mouth, burning through his skin.

He falls like he’s never fallen before, as his orgasm rips through him with a shocking violence that decimates everything in its path, tearing out of him with a raw scream that cuts through the air as powerfully as the way his brother’s body clenches and convulses around his thrusting cock. It sweeps through him with a devastating force that leaves him gasping for breath that simply won’t fill his lungs, with how hard it shakes through him, leaving him coming, coming, coming apart as the thick wet heat of his climax shoots deep inside his brother, splashing the walls of his altar and fills him up—so much of it, Dante thinks it’s never going to stop.

His vision cuts out—going white, then black at the edges, and for a startling, terrifying beat of his heart, he feels the edge of the devil trigger, as brimstone boils up through his blood, and the claws of his demon threaten to emerge—until he sucks in a desperate, shaking breath and color rushes back into his world.

Dante moans as the pillar of his trembling arm that had been holding him up collapses, and he goes down with it, face careening into the slick, sweaty curve of his brother’s neck. His heart thunders in his ears, pulsing through his skin, and every breath he draws in is filled with everything that is Vergil. He can feel the resonance of their blood, the way their bodies hum, and a profound sense of wholeness as the last missing piece of their souls falls in place. And he can feel himself, where he is pressed indelibly deep inside his brother, still pulsating with the aftershocks of his orgasm.

He lets out a laugh of disbelief, slicking his tongue over his lips to lap at the hot streak of come that had painted his face.

Vergil chuckles too, stroking Dante’s hair against his head and neck, soft and sweat-damp. “You’re a force of nature,” he murmurs, fondly, as he closes his eyes and steeps in the blissful, blunt-stunned aftermath. “Thank you, brother. That hit the spot.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” Dante huffs a soft, gentle breath against his brother’s throat, then manages to raise himself up just enough to look down on him. Vergil is wonderfully disheveled—his hair is wrecked, silver silk falling towards his eyes; his face glistens with sweat and come; his eyes are glossed with the hazy aftermath of lovemaking, a flush glowing on his cheeks, sweeping down his neck.

He is a breathtaking, beautiful mess, and he’s all Dante’s.

Dante’s smile is a tender thing that finds its way across his mouth. He eases his clean hand up, cupping his brother’s face. “God, I’ve missed you so much,” he murmurs, then leans down and kisses Vergil, his tongue seeking out traces of his brother’s pleasure, licking it off his lips.

“I can hardly believe this is real,” Vergil says softly, after a moment. Dante’s absorbed in kissing him, madly, gently, absently, and he closes his eyes, feeling the brush of his brother’s lips. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up in the demon world, and this will all be a cruel dream.”

Dante pulls back slightly—enough to look his brother in the eye. He reaches down and seeks out Vergil’s hand, then draws it up to his face, pressing it against his cheek. “This is real, Vergil.” His voice is as quiet as the brush of his lips against his brother’s palm. “But if it isn’t, let’s stay here forever.”

“Perhaps V failed, after all. Perhaps he did crumble into dust, and this is just a wistful dream in the eternal shadowy postlude of a once-child who loved poetry.” Vergil sighs. “No matter; I’ll take it.” But Dante’s lips feel more warm and real beneath his hand than ever, and his blood does not lie. Is incapable of lying. It purrs and curls along inside him, sated and indolent, cooing coyly to his brother’s. “Although if it were, I feel like it would be less…” he searches for a word, amused. “Lubricious. You must admit, this is entirely too much semen for poetry.”

“Really, Verge? _Lubricious?”_ Dante groans, laughing softly as he leans down and kisses his brother, slow and lingering. He breaks the kiss, then looks down on his twin, the fingers of his clean hand moving to gently stroke back Vergil’s hair in place. “Never thought I’d ever see the day when you’d admit there’s too much of anything for poetry. You better not be complaining, though.” He makes a point of licking an obscene smear of white off his brother’s cheek.

“Perish the thought,” Vergil murmurs, smiling at Dante’s wanton insolence. “Though perhaps a shower is in order. Then, perhaps, something to eat. I daresay you’ve roused my appetite.” He glances at his brother, idly. “Which begs the question; what would you like me to cook for you tonight?”

Dante hums and falls into a contemplative silence, opting to tuck his face back along Vergil’s neck, settling down comfortably. His brother used to cook up and feed him the most ridiculous meals—fancy shit Dante never knew the names of, but which he enjoyed immensely, if only because Vergil had made it for him. He probably would’ve enjoyed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made by his brother’s hands as much as his eggs benedict, complete with the cute little garnishes. He never thought the day would come that they would be lying here like this, wrapped up in each other’s arms, tangled in the essence of what they are—let alone taste his brother’s cooking again.

It’s a shame that the kitchen had been turned into a storage room well over a decade ago. There isn’t even a working stove or a refrigerator that has any contents other than booze and stale pizza.

“As much as I’d love to taste your cooking again, we’re probably gonna have to settle on take out. Kitchen’s outta commission, and I’m pretty sure there’s nothing edible in the fridge, anyway.” Dante sounds a little regretful as he idly drags his fingers over his brother’s jaw in a gentle, mindless brush. “Besides, why can’t I just have you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, huh?” He pushes himself up again and looks down on Vergil with a cheeky grin. “You can feed me plenty of protein, brother.”

Vergil smiles. “And I shall.” He’s mildly dismayed by the revelation that there is no kitchen to speak of—not least because it means his brother has been existing on convenience food for the past two decades. He feels a moment of profound regret that has nothing to do with raising a demon tower, or razing half of Red Grave City. Had he but stayed in the human world, had he but stayed with his brother, Dante would have never come to such despair. “I was wrong to leave,” he says softly. “Wrong to fall away from you. I have a great deal to make amends for.”

Dante’s eyes widen in surprise. He’s blindsided, completely.

The words, along with his brother’s sudden, unexpected turn of emotions, hit him squarely in the softest, unguarded part of him. It sinks straight down and shatters the pleasant, warm afterglow of lovemaking.

He never thought he’d live to see the day when his brother would come to believe what Dante has always known—that Vergil never should have left; that he never needed to chase after power, when he could’ve had something far greater. Vergil always acted so self-assured, certain of the righteousness of his actions, no matter the cost. He’s never once apologized for his choices before, and Dante never expected it of him.

And yet, Dante can see the remorse in his brother’s eyes, can feel it viscerally in the resonance of their shared bond.

Dante’s expression softens as he looks into Vergil’s eyes, cupping the sides of his neck, holding the pulse of his brother’s life in his hands. He presses their brows together and closes his eyes, and then he whispers, “I forgive you.”

Vergil lets out a shaky breath. His hands come up to grasp his brother’s wrists, reinforcing the lock of Dante’s hands on his neck. He feels prickling heat behind his eyes, a physical tell not unlike the need to sneeze, or orgasmic myotonia, and he realizes what he’s about to do.

He knows he could crush the impulse, like he’s done so many times before. He is nothing if not in supreme control of his human side. But in the wake of such vulnerability, laid bare before his brother, it seems graceless to suddenly draw the curtains on his soul. Instead, he succumbs—to human nature, to the emotion of the moment, which is balanced on twenty-four years of suffering and denial; to the brine brewing in his eyes. A tear forms, wells, and elongates. It slides over his cheekbone and down to his jaw.

It’s a disquieting, foreign sensation, and he cannot help but utter a strange sound. “I love you,” he says, swallowing. “Brother.”

It was storming the last time Dante heard Vergil say those three sacred words.

Twenty-four years ago, inside a demon tower Dante never wanted his brother to raise for him.

You know I love you, don’t you? Vergil had asked as they glared at each other across a bitter sea of enmity.

Dante hadn’t believed him then, because he was too angry, too young, too full of rage and sorrow and righteous indignation. You don’t fucking love me, he spat out through a mouthful of blood. If you did, you wouldn’t be doing this.

Lying here now, in the brutal aftermath of twenty-four years, with his brother trembling in his arms and the impossibility of a tear streaking down his face, Dante knows now what he couldn’t bring himself to believe back then—that his brother loves him, that he always has. That Vergil’s love for him had driven him mad. That he would’ve done anything in the name of that love, and believed that he did, however misguided and foolish that belief might have been.

Vergil fell for him.

He had died for him. He came back from the dead for him.

He sacrificed half a city of humans, just to get back to him.

He would’ve burned down the entire world for him.

All in the name of love.

Dante bends his head down and takes Vergil’s tear into himself, kissing it away softly before he presses their foreheads together once more, his fingers stroking up to cup his brother’s face. Love blooms beneath his ribs, behind his eyelids, and gently streaks down his cheek in a single droplet that mirrors his brother’s.

“I love you too, Vergil,” he whispers softly. “I love you too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A HUGE thank you to [shark_cat8221](http://twitter.com/shark_cat8221) for the incredible artwork for _Parousia_! This art is unbelievably gorgeous!! (The piece at the end is an illustration of the events of Chapter 2.) 
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> Thank you guys so much for reading! We will hopefully post the next chapter soon. :)
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	5. Chapter 5

The late afternoon sun spills through the arched window of the bathroom, over the clawfoot tub and the penny tile floor, gilding them both in its warm, flattering light. Vergil idly admires the bare, bronzed glow of his brother’s thewy arms resting on the tub sides, as Dante lays back in his embrace, content and sprawled with his full weight. It’s soothing to be clean and wet and warm, skin to skin like this.

They’d been here before, a lifetime ago. Vergil remembers holding an unconscious Dante in the aftermath of one cataclysmic encounter, before he fully knew how to master his devil. His brother is not unconscious now. He is merely very, very relaxed. Possibly even dozing a little, on and off.

Vergil raises a hand from the bath, the gesture chased by the faint sound of water drops from his fingertips, and smoothes his brother’s damp hair back from his brow, stroking with slow and steady motions. His other arm encircles Dante’s waist, his hold firm and reassuring; gently possessive. He doesn’t know how many hours he’ll need to hold Dante to make up for all the years he couldn’t, but it feels like a good start.

“Promise me something, Verge,” Dante murmurs into the quiet after some time, as he soaks in the warmth of his brother’s arms and the heat of the bath. “You gotta fuck me like that every day.”

An easy grin spills out over his face as he glances over his shoulder at his brother, taking in the golden sight of him, awash with sunlight. Outside, the world shines, fresh and new and wet. The sunlight had chased away the clouds, along with the storm, which swept away into the distance to fade on the horizon. 

“Twice a day,” Dante adds, as he studies the way Vergil’s eyes light up in the sun. He tells himself that he should probably go with Vergil on a walk sometime, soon. Reacquaint him with the world. Let him feel the sun on his skin again and learn how to be human once more.

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” says Vergil. 

It’s one of two games they never get tired of, left to their own devices. It’s always someone or something else that interrupts their mutual interludes. He remembers their first fight on Temen-ni-gru, all those years ago—the one where he’d driven Rebellion deep into his brother in the hopes of waking his demon. Vergil had gone back for seconds in the face of Dante’s goading, and was about to go back for thirds, when Arkham, annoyed and uncomprehending, persuaded him to leave it alone. 

Arkham had not understood or realized what he was seeing between them, any more than he knew what Vergil had done in stabbing Dante. He had been mistaken, most of all, to think he could come between the sons of Sparda. 

No one had ever been able to do that. Not even death.

“You weren’t half bad yourself,” Vergil murmurs, after a moment. “First time I’ve felt the sin stinger quite like that.”

Dante huffs with amusement. “All that work, and all I get is a ‘you weren’t half bad,’ huh? You _wound_ me, bro,” he declares with a wry grin as he turns and settles back comfortably against Vergil, letting his head roll back against his brother’s shoulder. “Guess I’ll just need to keep on practicing. It’s not like I was born with a Judgement Cock.” 

Vergil chuckles. His fingers curve back over his brother’s brow, keeping his idle caress. “You know I’m given to understatement. I would say my body told you everything you need to know about your prowess, wouldn’t you?”

Dante smiles as he lets his eyes close, enjoying the feeling of his brother’s gentle touch as it traipses over his skin and back into his hair. 

“Yeah, that sure was something.”

He’d never seen Vergil so unguarded and free in his arms before. There was always a part of himself that his brother held back; a piece of control he never wanted to fully relinquish. For the first time, Dante feels as though Vergil has finally surrendered all of himself. 

He can finally call Vergil _his_. 

The thought makes warmth bloom in his chest, as bright as the sun. 

“Thanks,” he says softly, as an afterthought, “for trusting me to be merciful.” He pauses, his fingers stroking over Vergil’s underwater, where they clutch him around his waist. “And for giving me your surrender. I know it’s not easy for you.” 

“No,” Vergil says, glancing down at the water for a moment. He thinks of the river they stood in, once, as adversaries. “But it’s the price of being loved. Protected. I’ve held myself apart all these years, first by choice and then necessity. I don’t want to be an island anymore.”

In some ways, V was more aloof and standoffish than his demon, who had been outright ebullient at the sight of his brother. He wonders if it was his human side, not his devil, who had been the detached, resistant one, all these years—not the lesson, but the one who needed to learn it.

Someone rings Dante’s buzzer, down below; a harsh rasp like a mechanical wasp. “Don’t answer that,” says Vergil. “Stay with me.”

Dante’s breath catches slightly in his throat. 

His heart gives a strong throb in his chest.

Vergil’s never once implored him to stay before. Dante was always the one who asked that of Vergil, but his brother never did grant him his request, until now. He never realized how much he wished he could hear those words uttered from his brother’s lips, even if he knows Vergil only doesn’t want him to break the idyllic indolence of the moment. 

He weaves their fingers together and draws their joined hands up to his lips, pressing a soft kiss against Vergil’s. “I’m not going anywhere,” he reassures, and then turns to look at Vergil over his shoulder. 

The buzzer sounds again, but Dante barely even notices. He’s studying his brother again, his eyes locked on Vergil’s, reveling in the way his brother looks at him—like he’s something to be revered and loved. 

“I like this new you,” Dante whispers softly, twisting a little more to kiss him softly, as the buzzer continues to ring, incessantly.

Vergil meets his lips, catching them gently with his own. “Same as the old me,” he murmurs. “Just re-minted.” 

Whoever is at the door leans on the buzzer for a good long time, before resuming the litany of staccato punches. Vergil’s eyes narrow. “You did turn off the neon last night, right? And flip the door sign to closed?”

“Y’know,” Dante begins, after a thoughtful moment of consideration, “I’m not actually sure. Things got kinda… heated. Sign might still be on.” The buzzer begins to ring in an infuriatingly annoying rhythm that can only mean one person. Dante groans, his forehead coming to a rest against Vergil’s. “ _Nero_ ,” he growls out, low in the back of his throat. 

All he wants is to soak in this tub with his brother and spend time with him _alone_ on their first real day together back home. But of _course_ , Nero just _had_ to crash the party. 

“Can we just pretend like we’re not home? He’s gotta give up eventually, right?” 

Vergil frowns. Of all the impressions he’d gotten of Nero in their brief and glancing acquaintance, _giving up_ was not the primary one. “I suspect he’ll get the message after a while,” he says, with a wry half-smile. “Unless you think he’ll actually break the door down. You know him best.”

Dante grumbles and then sighs, long and suffering, then tilts his chin and kisses Vergil softly, one last time for good measure. “I’ll get rid of him. He’s not just gonna go away. The kid’s persistent. He’s as stubborn as you,” he says as he reluctantly pulls away from Vergil and gets up from the tub, water sluicing over his skin, carving down the chiseled terrain of his body.

Vergil groans at the sight. “You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you.” He takes a deep breath and wills himself not to get hard. He’s half-successful. “Once wasn’t enough?”

Dante cringes slightly, glad for the distraction that happens to be his brother’s cock visibly hardening, to take the edge off what he knows was meant to be a joke. It still hits him low in the gut. “Too soon, brother,” he murmurs, his voice low, and then focuses his attention on his brother’s reawakening arousal. “Now _that_ , I wouldn’t mind getting back to.” 

He punctuates the statement with a cavalier grin, as he steps out of the tub and reaches for a towel to wrap around his waist. 

“Sorry,” murmurs Vergil, shifting to drape over the side of the tub, arms resting on the rim. “I forget not everyone shares my taste for gallows humor. I’ll take more care, brother.” He watches Dante swathe and tuck the towel low on his trim, taut hips, and can’t stop a smile from gracing his lips; predatory, involuntary. “Are you sure you don’t want me to handle it? He’s...my offspring, after all.”

Dante almost considers taking Vergil up on his offer, but he knows that if Vergil goes downstairs, he’ll come back closed up again, and he hadn’t worked so damn hard to break down all of his brother’s walls just to have Vergil erect them all over again. 

The only thing that should be standing up is his dick, which seems to be doing just fine.

“Nah, it’s cool, I got it,” Dante says with a smile. “You keep your gorgeous ass right where it is, and I’ll be back in a jiffy.” 

The urge to kiss Vergil again is suddenly overwhelming. Dante gives into it, leaning down, cupping his brother’s face, kissing him deeply. 

The buzzer hasn’t stopped in the interim, but for the first time it’s punctuated by a yell, just audible through the heavy wooden double doors. “I know you’re in there, Dante!”

Vergil doesn’t rush the kiss, and Dante doesn’t either. He seems in no hurry to break away. If anything, he lingers, savoring it. 

“If you don’t fucking open this door _right now_ , I’m gonna break it down, asshole!” 

Dante sighs, breaking the kiss reluctantly. “I’ll make it quick,” he promises as he straightens up, his fingers gliding along his brother’s jaw. He turns and heads out of the bathroom, closing the door behind him, and makes his way toward the front door.

“ _Dante!”_

The familiar rev of Red Queen’s engine begins to growl menacingly through the door.

“Okay, okay, hold your damn horses!” Dante yells, and then unlocks the door, yanking it open. 

Sure enough, Nero’s standing there with his damn sword in one hand, looking like he’s about two seconds away from cutting straight through the front door. The kid’s eyes widen slightly when he realizes that Dante answered the door wearing nothing but a towel.

“I was kinda in the middle of something, kid,” Dante says dryly. 

Nero scowls. “Couldn’t you have put some _clothes_ on?” 

“I would’ve, but some brat was yelling about breaking down my door if I didn’t open it.” 

To his credit, Nero looks a little sheepish for a moment, but that lasts for barely a second before his expression is replaced with one Dante knows a little too damn well—righteous indignation. 

“What the hell, Dante?! You didn’t think you should’ve _called_ me when you got back? I have a fucking _right_ to know!” 

“Only just got back last night, Nero,” Dante says, tiredly. The last thing he wants is to argue with his nephew—ha, funny, he actually has to think of the damn kid as his _nephew_. “I woulda called ya later, but you beat me to the punch.” He pauses, studying Nero. “Hey, wait, how did you even know?” 

“Morrison gave me a call,” Nero says, sounding absolutely sour. “Said he saw the lights on, but Trish and Lady are out on a mission. So that leaves you.” 

Damn Morrison. Of _course_ he’d call Nero. 

After all, Dante had been gone for over two months, and he’d more or less handed Devil May Cry to the kid. He can’t even bring himself to be angry about it; Morrison was just trying to be responsible, though his timing was pretty damn inconvenient. 

“Yeah, well, sorry you had to find out that way, kid. Didn’t mean for it to be like that.” 

Nero seems to take his half-assed apology, his eyes softening slightly, before sliding off Dante’s face, settling somewhere over his shoulder. His expression is suddenly surprisingly vulnerable. 

It’s not a look Dante’s all too familiar with, when it comes to the kid. 

“So uh…” Nero says, scratching at the back of his head a bit, not quite able to meet Dante’s gaze. “Didja come back… alone?” 

Well, that sure explains the vulnerability. Vergil tends to have that effect.

Dante scoffs lightly. “What, did you really think I’d leave your old man in the underworld? Of course I dragged him back.”

Vergil comes down the stairs and pads across the office, indolently fastening the fly of his brother’s slim black pants as he does. It’s all he’d had on hand, given that Dante had ripped the borrowed shirt right off his back the night before. He smiles at the memory.

In retrospect, it had seemed unfair to leave his little brother to beard this lion cub alone, so after Dante left the bathroom, he’d hauled himself out of the tub and hastily dried off.

He comes up behind his brother, just as he’s being invoked in the conversation, which seems an auspicious introduction. He slings an arm around Dante’s shoulders and offers a faint ghost of a smile. “Hello, Nero.”

“Speak of the devil,” Dante mutters as he leans slightly into his brother’s touch, glancing at Vergil. 

“Uh…” Nero says, suddenly unbelievably awkward, even for him. “Hi…” 

It’s like he doesn’t know what to call Vergil—and Dante almost feels bad for the kid, with the way he’s just standing on the front step like a kicked puppy or some shit, looking a little lost and uncertain as he stares at Vergil like he can’t really believe what he’s seeing. Yeah, Dante sure knows that feeling a little too intimately.

“Father?” suggests Vergil, wryly. “You chose that one yourself, as I recall. But Vergil is fine as well. As is ‘Dad’, if you must. I suspect you’ll choose what feels right to you. There’s no rush.”

He is aware that his fingers are gently and idly grazing Dante’s upper arm, the motion involuntary and affectionate. He stills it, unobtrusively. “Have you been taking care of things while Dante’s been away?”

“The world’s still standing, isn’t it?” Nero shifts his stance a bit, narrowing his pale eyes. “Surprised he’d even leave, with me being such _dead weight_ and all.”

“Really, kid?” Dante scowls, completely incredulous. “You’re still butthurt about that shit? Come on, that was ages ago. I thought you’d be over it by now.” He looks at Vergil, his expression twisted in consternation. “Where the hell does he get that from? Sure as hell ain’t from you. You’ve got way thicker skin than that.” 

“Hmm,” says Vergil, with a dry glance. “It’s certainly hard to recall anyone so rash and insistent, and capable of holding a grudge until the bitter end. I don’t know anyone like that. If I did, I assume they’d have rushed me on sight, for past transgressions, without stopping to engage me at all. Even after twenty-four years.”

“Hey, that ain’t even a fair comparison, Verge!” Dante complains loudly as his brows draw together in a frown. “I swear, I said it _one time_. It was just _one time!_ And your kid’s just—” He abruptly stops when the implication of Vergil’s words actually hits him. “Wait, hold on a minute. Are you saying he takes after _me?”_

“Oh, hell no!” Nero sounds completely incensed. “I’m not like Dante at all!” 

Vergil smiles, faint and wintry. “Clearly I stand corrected.” He gazes at Nero, flushed and earnest and unsure, standing on Dante’s doorstep. “Don’t just stand there. Come inside, why don’t you.”

Dante bites back a sigh and plasters a grin on his face. It appears that there’s no getting rid of Nero, after all, and he’ll have to share his brother. He begrudgingly steps aside, and Nero grins as he bends down and picks up a bag sitting at his feet.

He hoists it up before him. “I brought dinner.” 

“Well, why didn’t ya say so before?” Dante reaches out and grabs the bag. “Thanks, kid. We were just thinking ‘bout getting some food.” He turns and heads inside, already feeling the loss of Vergil’s warmth. 

Nero follows him in. “Hope you guys like Thai. I didn’t really know what you’d like so I kinda just got a lil’ bit of everything.” 

“It ain’t pizza, but beggars can’t be choosers,” Dante quips, as he sets the bag down on the wet bar.

“This is exquisite.” Vergil can smell the piquant, spicy aroma wafting from the bag. “I haven’t had Thai in…” He pauses, closing his eyes, not wanting to remind his brother of their lost years. “Quite a while.”

He turns and gazes at the handsome, clear-eyed young man who is, undeniably, his son. “Thank you. This was very thoughtful of you. Dante and I...haven’t had much of chance to leave the house.” He glances at his brother, amused. “Go ahead and put on some pants if you feel so inclined.”

Dante raises a brow, and then grins. “You’re _wearing_ my pants, bro.” 

Nero’s eyebrows shoot straight up towards his hairline as he does a double-take, his eyes sweeping down the length of his father’s legs. 

Vergil suppresses a smile. “You were wearing pants last night, so I assume you have more than one pair, my—” He breaks off, coughing softly. “Brother,” he finishes elegantly.

Dante flushes slightly as he hears what his brother hadn’t actually said— _my love._ Right in front of Nero, too. There’s no fucking way Vergil hadn’t done that intentionally. He’s far too calculated to ever make a mistake like that. 

For now, Nero at least seems completely oblivious, if not a little confused. 

“Okay, fine, if you insist,” Dante murmurs and then excuses himself to find a pair of pants that aren’t the ones his brother had decided to commandeer.

“You two seem to have worked out some issues while you were gone,” says Nero, glancing at Vergil sidelong as he starts to unpack the bag, pulling out crab rangoon and pad see yew and panang curry. “Get it all out of your system, then? The fighting? The bullshit?”

Vergil huffs faintly. “Dante and I have...rekindled our fraternity. During our time in the demon world, we had time to bond and...get to know each other again, inside and out.”

“Good, I guess,” mutters Nero, setting out chicken satay with peanut sauce. “I don’t get why you couldn’t have done that here, but whatever.”

“Dante sorely needed the time,” Vergil says quietly. “He hadn’t had a respite in...twenty-four years.”

Nero looks at him, with his sullen beauty and his insolent gaze—a morphology belying the ultimate decency of his nature. “So it was good for him. Was it good for you too?”

“Yes,” says Vergil, after a moment. “It was the reckoning we needed. Time alone. We never had that, since we were children. We spoke of many things.” In truth, they had spoken of those things only now, in the last day and night, but that was hardly the point. “I daresay our bond is stronger than ever. Consecrated.”

“Okay,” says Nero, seemingly surprised. “That’s good, then. Can’t have you two trying to kill each other. Brothers should love one another, right? I never had one. Never had anyone. I don’t get how you just throw something like that away.” He shakes his head, avoiding Vergil’s gaze. “I’d give anything to have what you have.”

“Chin up, kid,” Dante calls from the staircase, as he comes back down, clad in a henley with all the red washed out, and a pair of well-worn leather pants that had faded to the color of cracked asphalt under the sun. “You’ve got us now, and you’ve got Kyrie and the kids.” He reaches the bottom of the stairs and gives the kid a disarming, crooked grin. “You’ve got nothing to be sad about.”

“Yeah?” Nero asks and all Dante can think is _aw shit_ , because he can hear the fire boiling up in the kid’s voice, and before he can even do anything about it, Nero’s somehow closed the distance all the way to him and jabs a finger straight into his chest. 

“You. _Left._ ” 

Dante really wishes he were surprised about this sudden turn in his nephew’s emotions, but he really isn’t. He gets it, viscerally. 

“ _You fucking left!”_ Nero snarls, slamming his hands against Dante’s chest, shoving him back angrily. “You had no right to just leave me like that!” he yells, shoving Dante again, his eyes flashing with rage. “Not after everything, man! That was fucked up! Who the fuck are you to make that decision for me—”

“It’s because you have Kyrie and the kids that we couldn’t fucking take you with us, Nero!” Dante’s voice snaps across the distance between them and Nero blinks, abruptly disarmed, confusion flickering across his face for a moment, like he hadn’t actually considered that maybe Dante would’ve cared enough about that fact, let alone even consider it. 

“You really think I would’ve just let you leave that pretty girl and all those kids alone, without someone to protect them? Come on, kid!” Dante injects as much disappointment into his voice as he can—a proverbial bitch slap in the form of words. “You should know me better than that.” 

It seems to be working, because his nephew drops his hands down to his sides, his shoulders slumping as his eyes trail off Dante’s face. His face twists with a complicated, dejected frown. 

It’s like he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Dante knows this feeling a little too well.

After all, he had stood before Vergil far too many times in more or less the same fashion, when he was young. Shaking with anger and hurt and wanting nothing more than to just feel his brother’s arms wrap around him. Wishing he would stay.

Dante sighs as reaches out, and gives Nero’s shoulder a squeeze. His voice softens, along with his expression, as he says, “Besides, if we let you come, who the hell would protect the world, huh? We needed you here, because we couldn’t be here, Nero. You’re the only one strong enough.” 

That seems to do the trick. 

Nero sighs. “Yeah, well, you should’ve just said that.” 

“I did, kid.” 

_It’s because you’re here that we can go._

“Not like that.” 

All the wind goes out under Nero’s sails. It’s not a good look on him, and Dante cringes internally as he looks at the kid, instinctively understanding what he must have been feeling during the time he and Vergil were away—like he must not have been good enough to take with them; like they didn’t care enough about him to even consider bringing him along for the ride. He most likely believed it was easy for them to leave, because he didn’t matter enough to them; because he wasn’t special like them; because Dante thought he was dead weight.

“Aw, don’t be like that,” Dante says quietly, and then finally holds his arms out in an offer of a hug. He figures, if words aren’t working, this probably will. After all, it’s always been the only thing that ever really worked for him. “Come on, bring it in.” 

Nero stares at him like he’s crazy.

Dante rolls his eyes, takes a step forward, and hugs his idiot of a nephew, who immediately tenses like he’s about to fight in his arms, bristling all over. Dante waits. Slowly, but surely, Nero relaxes and hesitantly hugs him back. 

Dante looks over the kid’s shoulder to Vergil, who had been watching this entire exchange from safely behind the wet bar, and gives him an exasperated look.

Vergil gives back a shrug as if to say ‘some people’, and then parts with a slow, cryptic smile meant for Dante alone. 

Still, there is something undeniably poignant about watching his brother hug his nephew, as he’s embracing a part of Vergil, too. As he had figuratively embraced the kid even when Vergil was gone, knowing who he was, and whose blood he carried. Through that blood, he can feel both of their emotions—Dante’s more strongly, of course, for their twin bond; his son’s only a vague impression. Nero’s feelings are a jagged, hectic jumble, with an undertone of relief—and Dante is not as unmoved as his offhand nonchalance would suggest.

“We needed to be alone for a while. Somewhere neither of us had the world on our shoulders, for once,” Vergil says, looking down, his voice low and sueded. “It would never have been possible, if not for you. Thank you, Nero. Thank you for letting us have that.” He pauses. “Thank you for giving me my brother back.”

“No problem,” Nero manages to choke out the words, struggling for insouciance, though his voice hitches and his face is half-pressed against Dante’s faded red shoulder. His brother’s still got him crushed in his broad wingspan, and Vergil knows that Dante’s hugs are the best thing on earth—hard and encompassing and unselfconscious, even when he pretends he’s hating every minute of it. Like everything else, he gives his all.

Vergil eyes his brother’s leather pants surreptitiously, tracing upward, and then he registers the henley. “You could have grabbed me a shirt as well,” he says wryly. “As mine seems to have disintegrated. You’re hard on the things you love, brother.”

Dante doesn’t miss the innuendo in his brother’s words. He quirks a brow slightly, lips curving up with it, as he lets his gaze sweep unapologetically over Vergil’s bare, perfectly sculpted chest, letting his brother feel it like his touch. “Yeah, guess it must’ve slipped my mind.” 

It didn’t. He simply wanted to be able to gaze upon Vergil’s form, unencumbered.

He spreads his hand over Nero’s back, gently patting his nephew, before he pulls away, and focuses his attention back on the kid. Nero’s looking a little less hurt than he did earlier. The hug must have chased the storm clouds out of his eyes.

Dante grins, and claps his hand over Nero’s shoulder. “Let’s eat. I’m starving.” 

Nero doesn’t object, and follows Dante back to the wet bar, where the food had been laid out. It’s a little surreal to think that they’re about to have a meal together, the three of them. A regular family reunion. 

Dante makes a beeline for the spring rolls, grabbing one with his bare fingers and chomps down, chewing with relish. He watches as Nero glances at Vergil, almost nervously, before looking down at a backpack on the floor that Dante hadn’t noticed. 

The kid bends down, reaches into the bag, and pulls out a familiar leather book.

In retrospect, Dante really should’ve figured it out sooner. That damn “V” on the cover is impossible to miss, and looks just like a certain book Vergil had when he was a kid. Dante had assumed it was a freakishly strange coincidence, but he should’ve looked a little closer. 

“Here, I figure you’d want this back,” Nero says to Vergil, keeping his voice carefully light, as he offers the book to him. “...Dad.” 

Dante nearly chokes on his mouthful of spring roll. It’s definitely going to take a little while for him to get used to that. 

Vergil shoots Dante a sly, amused glance. His brother is clearly still struggling to wrap his mind around the reality of their new life. Vergil struggles too, but somehow hearing the word from Nero’s lips doesn’t unsettle him as much as he might have expected. It seems natural enough; he is, after all, this young man’s progenitor, in spite of still being relatively young himself. Vergil takes the book from him and thumbs through it for a moment.

“I had meant it as a gift,” Vergil says. “I wanted to leave you with something of mine. Something that was important to me as a boy.” He smiles, briefly. “Though my taste has moved on since then, there’s still much to admire here.”

He holds it out once more, and Nero takes it, almost hesitantly. “There are other things I could give you, if you found any merit there.”

“I liked it,” says Nero. “I’m not sure I get it all, the way I’m supposed to, but the words are really nice. Sometimes you want to read them a few times, you know, just for the...mouth-feel. Or mind feel,” he corrects, rubbing his head, “I guess.”

Vergil nods solemnly. “You understood just fine, then.”

Dante tries not to choke on his spring roll a second time, and pointedly reaches out to grab a beer, twisting the cap off, and washes down his urge to burst into laughter. He drinks half the bottle in a single go, then wipes his mouth with an irreverent swipe of the hand, looking Nero over. “Y’know, kid, I gotta say, I sure didn’t expect that from ya.” 

“Expect what?” Nero scowls, looking like he certainly doesn’t appreciate Dante interrupting the sweet father-son moment he was having with Vergil. 

“I didn’t think you even read! Let alone appreciate something as cheesy as poetry, but I guess you’re more like your old man than I thought.” Dante grins, and then he finally chuckles as Nero’s eyes narrow and he steps forward toward him. 

“Hey! I read! I read plenty of stuff!” 

“Yeah? Like what? Comic books don’t count, kid.” 

Nero sputters, completely outraged, flushing with anger and indignation. 

Vergil rolls his eyes. “Don’t take his bait, Nero.”

“Easy for you to say—” Nero begins, looking at Vergil, but pointing at Dante.

Vergil continues, smoothly. “In spite of his many...and apparent...charms, your uncle has a way of agitating for attention, on account of being a deprived child. He wants to get a rise out of you. Don’t let him. Stonewall him, instead. He hates being dismissed.”

As he says it, he reaches out, unthinking, to caress the back of Dante’s neck with his fingers. It’s a fond gesture that sands the edge off the words, to reassure his brother they’re an affectionate joke. It seems to work, as Dante doesn’t instantly object—too distracted by his touch. After a moment Vergil is aware of Nero’s eyes, and follows his son’s furtive gaze to his hand.

Vergil shows no reaction, but in the next moment, he trails his fingers down the back of Dante’s neck, and claps him on the back. His brother shudders, involuntarily, breathing in a short, sharp breath that’s barely audible. “He’ll be ruthless, if you let him.”

“Deprived child, my ass,” Dante mutters, though he’s stalwartly staring down at his next spring roll, trying to will his dick back down in his pants. He hadn’t expected Vergil to touch him in such a tender way—certainly not while Nero was watching, but maybe that was exactly what his brother wanted. To assert his dominance subtly over him and remind him of his place. 

Infuriatingly, it had worked. 

One touch was all it took for Dante’s arousal to flare alive. 

He’s glad for his leather pants. Glad that it’ll keep his erection at bay. Glad too, for the spring roll, which he shoves into his mouth and washes down with the last of his beer, as he settles down on one of the stools along the bar. 

“Uh,” says Nero, looking at Dante curiously, slightly surprised by his apparent lack of a volatile reaction, then looks back to Vergil. “So you’re saying all I gotta do is just ignore him?”

“Well, no,” Vergil admits, making a face. “He seems to take that as a particular challenge.” His smile is knowing, the frostiness of the gesture only skin-deep, scarcely concealing his obvious affection. “Although if you want to drive him insane, and you can handle the fallout, feel free to try. Though I don’t personally recommend it.”

He’d tried that tactic many times, both as a child and a man. It had never done anything but make Dante redouble his efforts, outraged at being dismissed. At being left behind.

“No,” Vergil says, slowly, gazing at Dante obliquely, letting his eyes linger with heavy study. “I’ve found the only sure way of taming my brother...is to indulge him.”

“Hey, I’m right here, ya know,” grumbles Dante, clearly unamused, as he reaches out for another beer and cracks it open. “I can hear you assholes just fine.” He gestures with the mouth of the bottle at Vergil. “Come on, Verge, you can’t just give away the playbook. How’s the kid ever gonna learn, if you just give him the cheat sheet?” 

He takes a healthy swig of the beer, guzzling down a quarter as he reaches for the last spring roll, and proceeds to hold it up to Vergil’s face. “Now shut up and eat.”

“You too,” he says, as he looks at Nero, who obliges by settling down and reaching for the pad see yew.

Vergil leans across the bar and takes a deliberate bite of the spring roll in his brother’s hand. “Delicious,” he says, after swallowing. He plucks the rest from Dante’s grasp with a coy glance and goes in search of the plum sauce, which is surely somewhere in the maze of containers. “You know, Nero, I think the best tactic with Dante is to just let his words roll off you.” He pauses, with a dry, wicked lilt in his voice. “Like his attacks.” It’s a quip he knows he’ll pay for later, but he can’t help himself. He dips the end of the spring roll and finishes it with a flourish. Dante’s ensuing expression gives him a creeping heat in unspeakable places. Vergil smiles.

“Sure, brother, just let my attacks roll off you,” Dante drawls as his eyes settle heavily on his brother. “Like my sin stinger.” He says it with a completely straight face, as he finishes his beer, his gaze never once leaving his brother’s face.

“Huh, that’s a new one,” Nero remarks by his side, through a mouthful of noodles. “Is that like, when you’re in your new trigger form or something?” 

“Or something,” says Dante as he finally cracks a grin. “Knocks Vergil right off his ass. Kinda hard for him to defend against.” He claps a hand over his nephew’s shoulder good naturedly. “Even your old man’s got a weakness.”

“He certainly does,” Vergil says, eyeing Dante right back, and there’s a quiet smolder in the embers of the words he doesn’t bother to snuff out.

He’s deeply amused by his brother’s audacity, which has undeniable shades of the unsubtle brat of his youth. Nero seems none the wiser, and this impromptu game is proving stimulating in unexpected ways. “I think that particular form of the sin stinger only works on me. It’s something of an Achilles….heel.”

Vergil reaches for the carton of pad thai and serves himself, impressed that Nero was actually able to scrounge up three plates. Mismatched, of course, but nonetheless. When Dante had first suggested take-out, he’d had visions of them sitting in his brother’s bed, trading cartons back and forth.

In retrospect, the thought is quite appealing. He smiles to himself. 

“So you think I can defend against it?” Nero asks very innocently with bright eyes, looking a little too interested. 

“Sorry Nero, it’s kinda a twin thing, if you get my gist,” Dante says with a wink, and reaches for yet another bottle of beer. Vergil eyes him as he does, noting it but saying nothing. There’s no particular judgment on his face; merely awareness. Then again, his brother guards his reactions well when he wants to.

“How the hell is it a twin thing?” Nero’s face scrunches up in consternation.

“Let’s just say we have a special bond,” Dante says with a toast of beer, and then proceeds to snag the carton of pad thai Vergil had just served himself with, for himself. He ceremoniously dumps the contents out on his plate as Nero just makes a face and rolls his eyes.

“Special bond,” the kid mutters. “Whatever.” 

If Dante didn’t know any better, he’d think the kid sounded jealous. 

Vergil shakes his head and dips into the soup. “Tom kha talay,” he says, savoring it. He looks at Nero approvingly. “An excellent choice. I don’t know who raised you—it certainly wasn’t me—but they did a commendable job,” he says dryly, with a hint of underlying warmth.

Nero doesn’t seem quite as wounded by his dark humor as Dante. Instead he makes with that impudent smile. “I had a family, but when it comes to the important stuff...I pretty much raised myself,” he says quietly, frankly. “Like you, maybe.”

Vergil feels an unexpected twinge at that, growing more brutal as it lingers. Dante gives him a cautious look, studying him for a moment as a barely imperceptible crease forms between his brows. “Yes,” he says, after a moment. “That figures, doesn’t it.”

“And Dante here,” adds Nero, with a sidelong glance at his uncle, who is polishing off his third beer—shotgunning it with an aplomb Vergil has very recently seen turned to his advantage in the bedroom.

“Ah, Dante. Well. The result speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Vergil says it flippantly, but his eyes tell another story as they land on his brother’s.

It’s not so strange, after all, this business of family. Vergil finds himself oddly at peace, breaking bread with his surly-faced cupid of a son, and his gorgeous demolition derby of a brother. The talk is never stagnant, at least, and there are plenty of ribald jokes and incisive jibes—particularly between Nero and Dante, who seem determined to be at odds, if only demonstratively—but it all feels very clannish. Very familial. The blood resonates in them all and Vergil finds a sense of sophrosyne in that. It’s a feeling he hasn’t felt before: hearth, home, anchors to time and place. He is surprised to find that it does not dismay him.

Three devils can lay waste to a great deal, and as the contents of the containers dwindle and the sun sets outside, Vergil can sense Dante’s growing impatience.

His eyes linger longer and longer every time they’re drawn to him, glancing down the naked expanse of his chest and settling on his lips with a palpable longing every time Nero’s not paying attention. There’s a quiet heat in his brother’s gaze that he’s admirably doing his best to control, but self-control has never been something Dante has ever had in great abundance.

“Thanks for dinner, Nero.” Dante gives his nephew a warm smile. 

The kid’s not half-bad when he wants to be altruistic. Dante sure as hell isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and he’s grateful for the kind gesture, but there’s an itch under his skin that he sure as hell can’t scratch while Nero’s here. 

“Yeah, anytime,” Nero says with a bright, ebullient grin, genuinely happy in a way Dante’s only ever seen when he’s with Kyrie. His whole face has lit up, and he’s buzzing with quiet, contained warm energy that suffuses his entire being. 

Dante almost feels bad about the prospect of throwing the kid out when he’s so happy spending time with his family. Having their first real family dinner. 

It’s not like he can tell Nero that he’s overstayed his uninvited welcome, because that would just make the kid all sullen and dejected again, and Dante really doesn’t feel like cleaning up that mess. 

He feigns a loud yawn instead, covering his mouth in the process for good measure. 

Vergil eyes his brother sidelong, amused. His brother’s yawn is theatrical, exaggerated. Vergil knows his cue. “I think your uncle Dante is fading. It’s been a hard few months. A lot of demons. Some deep conversations.” He smiles soberly at Nero. “I should probably put him to bed.”

Nero nods, readily enough. “Yeah, of course. I get that. I just...wanted to see you guys.”

Dante gives Nero his best impression of an apologetic grin. “Sorry to cut it short, kid. We’ll make it up to ya sometime soon.” 

It’s not a promise he makes often, but given the circumstances, it seems right. 

“Yeah, you better,” Nero says, as he gets up and bends down to grab his bag, slinging it over a shoulder. “I’m gonna hold you to that.” 

“Don’t worry,” Dante reassures as he hands Nero Red Queen, which had been leaning against the bar. “It sure as hell won’t be another two months before we see ya.”

Vergil pauses, about to grasp Nero’s shoulder in a perfunctory farewell, when he sees the boy’s eyes, which are full of uncertain emotions, tentative but hopeful. Vergil feels a distant cramp in his chest. He knows what it is to want protection and love. He pauses for a moment, and then wordlessly pulls Nero into a silent embrace. If he can be human for Dante, he can do as much for his son, no matter how exposed and vulnerable such a thing might be.

Nero grips him immediately, with a vigor that surprises him, laying his head against Vergil’s bare chest. He allows it, and brings his hand up to stroke Nero’s hair, after a moment.

Dante watches with quiet fascination. 

He hadn’t expected Vergil to take Nero into his arms—certainly not in such a tender way. Tenderness has never come easily for his brother; he has to allow himself to steep in the humanity of the moment, and humanity has never been something that Vergil embraced. 

Maybe his brother really is beginning to learn how to accept the part of him he’d always wanted to destroy. 

“It was good to see you, Nero,” says Vergil.

“Yeah,” the kid manages, as he slowly disengages. “I’m glad you guys got out. I thought...maybe you wouldn’t come back at all.”

“You really think I could live forever without pizza?” Dante quips with a grin as he gets up off the bar stool. “Gotta have my creature comforts, if ya know what I mean. The underworld doesn’t have a whole lotta that.” 

“Heh, you don’t say.” Nero smirks with understanding and then looks at Dante, his eyes lingering a beat too long, which can only mean one thing.

“Aw, hell,” Dante mutters and then steps forward, sweeping Nero into another hug. 

They’ve never been the hugging type before, but that was before Nero knew the truth; before he had a family. Nero’s arms wrap around him and Dante gives him an affectionate clap on the back, before he pulls back. He grasps the kid’s shoulder, giving him a good squeeze as he looks him right in the eye. 

“You take care of yourself, now, okay?” 

“Psh, I took care of the world just fine when you assholes went on vacation without me. I think I can manage to take care of myself.” 

“Who said anything about taking care of the world? I was just talking about you wiping your ass.”

Nero’s face immediately contorts with a scowl, and he’s about to come back at Dante with a retort, a finger pointing in his direction, when he glances at Vergil and seems to recall his father’s advice. He closes his mouth abruptly and rolls his eyes.

Dante feels a twinge of disappointment. He doesn’t even try to hide it.

Nero hesitates on the doorstep, looking at them like he’s afraid they’ll vanish if he turns his back, like he’s memorializing this moment. “Okay. You get some rest. I’ll check up on you in a few days.” It’s not a question. He leaves, glancing back a couple of times, holding up a vague wave the last time.

Vergil closes the door. He doesn’t turn around right away. “Poor Nero. He doesn’t understand that it’s about us, not him.”

Dante’s arms slide around him from behind, unable to resist the gravity of Vergil’s body any longer. He sighs as their bodies draw flush and he presses a kiss into the curve of his brother’s neck. 

“Can’t blame the kid for wanting what he’s never had,” he murmurs as he rests his chin on Vergil’s shoulder and tightens his arms around his brother’s waist. “Though, I gotta say, Verge, I’m a little surprised… wasn’t expecting ya to be all sweet on him.” 

Vergil turns his face into his brother’s with a small, absurd smile. “You light him up mercilessly. Someone has to be the counterweight.” He pauses for a beat, reaching up to grasp the back of Dante’s neck, locking in the embrace. “Not jealous, are you?”

“What if I am?” 

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	6. Chapter 6

He doesn’t mean it. 

Not completely.

Though it wouldn’t be all too difficult to believe, given how prone to jealousy he was in their youth. The thought of Vergil giving anyone else his love and attention, touching them with the same hands he used to hold Dante, was unbearable. It wasn’t until their final week together before Vergil left that Dante finally discovered the truth—that his brother had always been faithful to him.

That he never needed, or wanted, anyone else.

Dante knows that he has no reason to be jealous of Nero. But he can’t help feel a territorial twinge of possessiveness when he thinks of the fact that he’ll have to share his brother. That there is a small part of Vergil he’ll be forced to relinquish to Nero.

“Maybe I just want you all to myself.” 

“Do you really think there’s anyone else in my universe?” asks Vergil, quietly. “Biology made you my brother, but I chose you as my lover, Dante. I will always choose you. I never wanted a son, but as fate would have it, I have one now. Fortunately for me, he’s exceptional. Much like his uncle.”

Vergil angles his gaze toward his brother’s full, faintly grinning lips at their close proximity. “I suppose the other question is, are you jealous of me, or of him? Or both?” He pauses. “Was there anything, Dante? With Nero? Before you knew? Or perhaps...after?”

The implication is startling. 

Dante frowns as he draws back, and turns Vergil around in his arms so that he can look at him properly. His hands frame his brother’s shoulders, holding him as he searches Vergil’s eyes. He’s shocked that Vergil could even think it at all—that Dante would dare to fuck his son, knowing that he was the only part of Vergil that still breathed. 

Perhaps Vergil could see it if only because Nero _was_ the only part of him that still walked the earth—maybe it wasn’t so hard to imagine that Dante would want to embrace that, if only because it meant he could still have a part of Vergil, no matter how small. 

But Nero isn’t Vergil.

And Dante could never disgrace his brother’s memory in such a way. 

It would hurt too much.

“Vergil,” he says as a frown creases between his brows, “your kid’s cute and all, but he’s not you. I would never.”

Vergil nods, slowly. “I just want you to know that...had you...I wouldn’t hold it against you. I’d understand. But I would also understand some of his angst. It seems, however, he is merely wistful. That he truly only wants a family.”

“The thing is, he’s got one already,” Dante murmurs. “He’s got a pretty young thing of a ladyfriend, and kids that love him. I think maybe… he just really wanted what we have. A deeper connection.” One that could only be found in the resonance of their blood, and not in their humanity.

Vergil feels a cold qualm. “Ah yes. These _kids_. You mentioned them before. Dante, I need you to level with me: am I a fucking grandfather? Father, I can handle, but…” He trails off, shaking his head in stark disbelief. “He’s only twenty-four. He shouldn’t make the same mistake I——” Vergil abruptly stops, aware of what he’s saying.

Dante’s eyes dance with mirth and he grins, wide and broad, as he gives his brother’s shoulder a squeeze. “Aw, don’t worry so much, Verge! Those kids are great! You should see Nero with them, he’s like dad of the year. Yeah, I guess it’s a lot to wrap your head around, but it can’t be all that bad, right? Maybe they’ll even call you Pappy and ask ya for bedtime stories.”

Vergil is silent for a moment, then he leans back against the door, abruptly, running a hand over his face. “I feel ill,” he utters, in a sub-tone. It’s almost like inhabiting V again, the malaise and sudden weakness in his limbs. “Give me a moment.”

The sudden thought to grab Yamato and slash a path back to the underworld is overwhelming, tempting.

Dante stares at his brother for a moment, taking in just how aghast Vergil seems to be. Really, he should feel bad about this, but instead he bursts out laughing, nearly doubling over as he clasps Vergil’s shoulder again, his own shaking. “You should see your face,” he wheezes out. “I was fucking kidding, bro, calm down.”

Vergil sinks down to the floor, slowly, back against the door, coming to rest with his hands steepled between his knees, letting his head hang forward. “Then what are these _kids_ you speak of?” he mutters feebly, after a moment.

Dante sighs as he looks down at his brother, a twinge of guilt tugging at him. Maybe he overdid it just a little, if Vergil’s reaction is anything to go by.

He crouches down before his brother, taking his face in his hands. “They’re just kids from an orphanage that Nero looks after,” he explains softly. “He’s a good kid. His girlfriend, too. But I doubt they’re thinking of starting a family anytime soon. Despite the kid’s appearance, I’m pretty sure his girlfriend’s the marry first, fuck later kinda gal. I don’t think he’s ever even wet his whistle.”

Vergil raises his eyes to look at his brother. “Are you serious right now? Is this another joke?” As a revelation it’s almost more chilling than the idea of being an antecedent. “How many times do you think we…” He can’t even finish the question. They both know the answer. He holds up a hand. “I know, I know. This is what I get for knocking up someone in a crazy religious cult. You don’t have to say it.” 

“Since you brought it up, brother,” Dante says, as he makes himself comfortable on the floor, his fingers slipping off Vergil’s face. “You ever gonna tell me _that_ little doozy of a story? Gotta say, I was pretty shocked to discover you even had that in ya. When did you even find time to put a bun in the oven, huh?”

Vergil chuckles softly. It’s a rueful sound. “What’s to tell? It’s a pretty prosaic story, isn’t it? Disenfranchised young man in a strange city where they worship his father, keeping to himself. Chip on his shoulder. Daddy issues. And one night...when he’s brooding, alone, a girl comes to him. He knows she’s been watching him, and he has studiously ignored it until now. But this night, he is...melancholy. Perhaps lonely. There is an emptiness in him beyond that of merely being an orphan. He does not yet know that he is missing a part of himself, that he is destined to feel this way until he finds it again. So when she offers first comfort, then herself…” He shrugs. “He does not decline. Nor does he remember her name.”

Dante had always wondered how Nero had come to be. 

He always imagined that it was a youthful indiscretion, a torrid one night stand when Vergil was first coming into his sexuality. It would have been a pleasant memory to look back on, something to laugh about, perhaps. Though maybe, that was simply what Dante wanted to believe, because the alternative—that his brother had suffered as he did—was devastating. 

Dante’s expression softens as he reaches forward, claiming Vergil’s wrist and pulling his brother into his arms. He clutches him close, and strokes a hand up into Vergil’s hair. “You’re no longer missing a part of yourself anymore, Vergil. And neither am I.” 

“No,” Vergil murmurs, his lips just brushing the wasted fabric of Dante’s red-faded, near-pink henley. “And it wasn’t long after that... encounter... that I learned of your existence. And everything fell into place. I knew two things: that night and day, my soul cried out for yours, and that there would never be another.”

When he was young, Dante had always thought that he loved his brother far more than he ever was loved in return. He believed that it was easy for Vergil to walk away from him, if only because he simply didn’t love Dante the way that Dante loved him. 

But Dante now knows the truth: that it is impossible to measure the depth of his brother’s love for him. It is deeper than any ocean, stronger than any force of nature, broader than the entire universe. There is no language with which it can be defined, no vocabulary that could ever express the sheer power of Vergil’s love, or how it feels to be loved by him. 

If he had the words, or knew what to say, he might tell him this: I have loved you, and only you, my entire life. Loving you is the only reason I have ever wanted to be alive. I love your smile at midnight and your eyes at dawn; the taste of your breath in my mouth and the warmth of your arms. I love your quiet laughter in your secret, unguarded moments, and the way your eyes go soft and distant when you think that I’m not looking. I love the words that spill off your tongue, even when I don’t understand half the ones you use; and the way you tell me you love me without even speaking a word. Sometimes it’s just a look, and that’s all it takes for me to know that you have loved me, and only me, your entire life. That loving me is everything that makes you want to be alive. That there is no you without me, and no me without you—that we are the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

But Dante doesn’t know how to say this out loud. He doesn’t know how to tell Vergil what he has known all along—that there is nothing in this universe that can ever compare to their love. 

Instead, he tightens his arms around his brother.

He holds him tenderly, and he whispers a secret he has always held inside the depths of himself: “I think I was put on this earth to love you, brother.”

Vergil breathes out, turning his lips against the shell of Dante’s ear. “We were born together. We were made for each other, and no one else—my brother. My love. How rare to hold you at last.”

He is struck by how a hard floor can feel like heaven.

“Let the world go on; my world is here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We know this chapter is short, but it was important that this fic had 6 chapters to reflect the 6 chapters of [The Sacred and the Profane](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18333230/chapters/43400567).
> 
> Thank you so much for reading this fic! We hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> Part 3, _Atonement_ , will be coming soon. It is complete, and currently being revised. (For those of you who read the draft, there will be some changes and edits for clarity, but the story will still remain more or less the same.) 
> 
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